Lydia Lunch, F. Bifo Berardi, M. Bertoni - At the end of time

A year has passed since the release of "Wrong Ninna Nanna" (2020), a project of music and words born almost by miracle, out of a series of unlikely connections linking Bologna to the United States, the experimental no-wave scene of Emilia with Lydia Lunch, spoken-word experimentation brought up to date with the recent Syrian war, the philosophy of Franco Berardi and the voice of Bobby Gillespie (Primal Scream, The Jesus And Mary Chain). A complex work, starting from an idea by Bologna-based musician Marco Bertoni, a key figure of the Italian new wave with Confusional Quartet, who draws on Franco Berardi's extraordinary lyrics to create an album/book about the difficulty faced by human beings born on the wrong side of the world (in this case Honduras is the subject, but the story could just as easily be set in Syria or Palestine) in finding a safe place in the modern world, in a society ruled by finance and the globalized market. A genuinely left-wing text – the authentic kind, one that hasn't sold its soul – enriched by contributions from two giants of international music, none other than Lydia Lunch and Bobby Gillespie.

We had the pleasure of interviewing three of the four protagonists of the project.

Lydia Lunch

It's an honor to be able to talk with a musician like you. How did Marco and Bifo manage to convince you to take part in their project?

Quite simply: they asked me!

The constant need to remain political and to speak out against apathy and ignorance.

On my Bandcamp you can check out Universal Infiltrators. I have a similar project called GRID with Tim Dahl (co-host of my podcast /RETROVIRUS). And there's a new record with Sylvia Black that's part spoken word, part noir jazz. Both will be out early next year.

As a conceptual artist, when the impulse strikes, I find the right collaborators, whether it's a musical or a film project. I'm constantly recording, playing, and right now I'm working on a documentary with Jasmine Hirst about Artists-Depression-Anxiety and Anger, which will be finished in a few months.

I've also lived in London, Los Angeles, Barcelona and New Orleans, at times that were important for my creative growth. Is New York just a state of mind? For some it might be. Everything is cyclical. There are great artists everywhere. I left New York for decades and didn't miss it. Yes, I lived there in an era that people who never experienced it tend to idealize: in the '70s it was also bankrupt, violent, desperate, disgusting and fun. Ha!

Movements are only "movements" in retrospect. There will always be incredible, complex, avant-garde artists and musicians. Marc Hurtado, Weasel Walter, Ian White of Big Sexy Noise, and Gallon Drunk, who have a new LP coming out. "GRID" by Tim Dahl. Sylvia Black, Admiral Grey of Cellular Chaos, and many others. That's one of the reasons I've been doing my podcast, The Lydian Spin, for two years now. To showcase creative individuals in every field, who keep expressing themselves in unique and transformative ways.

You're a musician, poet, writer, photographer. I could say your whole life is proof of how art can change every one of our lives. Very often today, art – music and film, for example – gets sold as pure entertainment. What's your relationship with that kind of product?

In a word, almost none. Not that I don't find RETROVIRUS or Big Sexy Noise "entertaining", but that's not the point of what I do. These bands are exciting because there isn't enough rock music around right now, and it's needed. If I entertain you, thank you. It means you're as perverse as I am.

I hope so, as soon as possible! I'll be touring Europe in October and November with several projects: besides performing, I'll take part in the presentation of "The War Is Never Over", the documentary on my career that Beth B shot in Switzerland, Spain, the UK and Germany. I hope to be back in Italy next year.

Marco Bertoni

The idea behind the "Wrong Ninna Nanna" project is really interesting, especially because it brings together an experimental musician like Marco Bertoni, a journalist/philosopher like Franco Berardi, and two singers like Lydia Lunch and Bobby Gillespie. Did you draw on some pre-existing project, or was it your own idea from the start?

"Wrong Ninna Nanna" is a work born spontaneously, starting from the suggestion of the title I proposed to Bifo, a suggestion that grew and developed thanks to Bifo's own beautiful, profound lyrics. We were guided by a shared sense of imminent ending, a complete darkness with no hope, but also full of irony.

In making "Wrong Ninna Nanna" we didn't draw on any other project, apart from the natural evolution of our meeting, and subsequently the collaboration with Lydia Lunch and Bobby Gillespie. When the lyrics were written, the music didn't exist yet. When the music was written, we still didn't know who would perform/sing it. It was all very precarious, instinctive and immediate, surprising.

The avant-garde scene, or we might say experimental electronic music, is hugely varied and present all over the world. Is there a musician who has particularly caught your attention in recent years?

I follow and try to listen to everything, because I'm interested in everything, but there isn't much that makes me stop and want to study it or get passionate about it. The work done on "Wrong Ninna Nanna" spontaneously follows approaches and gestures I've been practising for a long time (now certainly with more cutting-edge technology), always seeking a mental state that leads me to find and assemble sounds and notes I intimately love.

Does this project have a future, or is it an experience destined to end with a single album?

After the summer we'll take "Wrong Ninna Nanna" on the road. The collaboration between Bifo and me will continue with other projects. In fact, after "Wrong Ninna Nanna" we've already made another work together, an animated video written and directed by Bifo (with Bifo's spoken word and my music) titled "Out Of Pumpkin", commissioned and exhibited at the Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe in Hamburg.

Franco "Bifo" Berardi

Your lyrics struck me deeply – I felt like I was finally hearing a vital, current left-wing language, in a world where any critical thought against capital is considered dead and buried. In my review I wrote "A truly left-wing text – the authentic kind that hasn't sold its soul". Do you agree?

I don't know what the left is, nor what the soul is. But how could I disagree with the intention behind your question?

"Today Hitler is everywhere, and he speaks softly about our future." What did you mean by that?

From Duterte's Philippines to Modi's India, where the parliament building is being torn down to purge the country of its Islamic imprint, to Iran, which will soon be entirely in the hands of the Pasdaran, to the Palestinian territories where anti-Semitic pogroms unleashed by Tsahal are the order of the day, to France where Le Pen is closing in on the presidency, to Italy under the Salvini-Draghi government, to the Mediterranean where a daily holocaust unfolds in the form of mass drownings and handovers to torturers — everywhere, it's the nationalist and racist principle that's guiding people. What other future can we imagine besides a growing post-pandemic chaos and a growing totalitarianism?

Some people are born on the wrong side of the world (Syria, Palestine, etc.) and are condemned to a life of poverty. Do you still see hope in the world? Can there be an alternative, and could it be carried by music or cinema?

Let's be honest: if demographers' projections hold true, we'll reach eleven billion inhabitants by the end of this century. The planet is shrinking, because coastal areas are becoming less and less habitable, and entire regions of the Eurasian continent are being rendered uninhabitable by desertification and rising temperatures. It would seem a bit presumptuous to me to say that poetry, or music, or cinema can save anything or anyone, when water, air and land are growing ever scarcer, and the great corporations of global capital keep pursuing their fixation on economic growth. Perhaps they can help us enter the mental sphere of exhaustion and extinction. Not even the pandemic trauma has stopped the frenzy of value accumulation that destroys the living, the thinking, the future.

So what trauma will manage to stop it? What awaits us in the phase following the pandemic shock is perhaps a prolonged psychic depression. Perhaps that's where the negative energy that will allow us to slow the pace down will come from? Can depression bring about a slowdown in consumerism, in this devastating frenzy?

But isn't there a risk that depression will instead produce, as happened in the past century, a hysterical and aggressive reaction? Fascism is born out of humiliation, out of economic and psychic depression. I think that's the alternative we'll find ourselves facing in the coming months and years. Processing the trauma and the depression that follows it is the main task. This is the task of art, of poetry, of cinema: to process depression collectively, to process trauma.

Coming back to today's language, which has now become simplified and flattened to a suffocating degree. I was truly stunned by the words of the PD's secretary, who expressed solidarity with Israel right after it had bombed Palestine, so casually betraying the left's long history of friendship with the Palestinian people. It seems to me that "Wrong Ninna Nanna" is also a work of resistance. Do you agree?

Resistance, you say? Certainly, in the sense that we aim to resist the mental disintegration that leads this wretched secretary of a party with neither head nor tail to offer his solidarity to the aggressors, arm in arm with the leader of Italy's racists.

Ride the wave of great music

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Valerio D'Onofrio, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition