Melanie De Biasio - All the Colors of Black

We meet Melanie De Biasio at the Alcatraz in Milan, a few hours before her opening set for Agnes Obel. The Italian-Belgian artist, who returned in 2013 with a new album after several years away, tells us a great deal, revealing every side of her personality. From the importance of having studied music in order to work best with the musicians she plays with, to the idea of listening to her own emotions without calculation when writing songs, to the need to constantly experiment with something new, Melanie proves to be an artist attentive to every detail, brimming with vitality and eager to broaden her artistic path.

I read in your biography that you studied music for a long time before you started touring and writing songs. Many people might think that if you have talent, being a musician comes easy, so I'd like you to tell me everything you want about the importance of studying before starting a career as a professional musician.

I started studying flute at age 8, then I learned solfège, choral singing, and for me it was important to learn the alphabet of music, because later it helped me establish communication with the other musicians I played with. Music is another way of communicating, and from the very first times I worked with other musicians, playing flute in a folk orchestra at 12, I understood that learning music serves to build communication with the people you're playing with. It wasn't just about playing flute alone at home, even though having studied was important to start understanding how to build a sound together with other musicians. And I told myself, "so this is why my mom wants me to study all these things," because playing isn't just about doing your own part well, it's also about building something together with other musicians and sharing it with the audience — it's a total experience. Understanding this gave me even more motivation to keep studying music, because school itself wasn't really for me, since I need to understand the point of studying and learning things, and when it came to music, I had grasped that point perfectly.

I imagine that many people reading this interview – myself included, I confess – will start, or will have started, listening to you from this new album, which is your second. What can people who already know this album expect if they then want to listen to the first one as well?

Listening to the first album is worthwhile if you want to know a bit more about the Melanie of five or ten years ago. The experience was completely different, especially because in the studio the record was made the old-fashioned way, meaning everyone played together, and if something was wrong, the song was redone from scratch. It has more jazz overtones, there are more solos, mostly because I made it shortly after finishing school, and compared to now, I was more influenced by the jazz context, by the way of playing through improvisation. It was only after that record that I realized my idea of improvisation is still about building something together, something special and fresh, that reflects the inspiration of the moment while also being very deep. I think today the challenge is to build improvised music based on simple ideas, and to do it together, developing a sense of presence, not just a series of notes.

Where do you start when you write a song? From a melody, from a sound, from what you want to say in the lyrics?

I start from an emotion, then I let the vibration that emotion gives me become a sound, and from that sound come the melody and the rhythm, but everything comes from an emotion.

Going back to the importance of building a sound together, when you record an album do you simply let the other musicians bring their own sensibility and style into the songs, or do you still tell them they have to play these specific notes or chords?

I think the context needs to be well defined, and within that defined context I let them play, and then I choose what convinces me most. On this record I let them play, but then in post-production I removed some things to make sure the essence of my stories, my emotions, my sensibility came through. Within that context, the songs were written and well defined, except for the last one on the record.

Can we talk in general terms about the emotions that gave rise to the songs on this record, or was each one different from the others?

I think you could say that the range of emotions in this record is like a rainbow, there are so many colors, I can say “I love you” in so many different ways. And you could say the same about the black on the cover, I think black contains all the colors within it. You can travel through this whole spectrum, moving between one emotion and another, I don’t think there’s a single dominant emotion in this record, there’s light but there’s also darkness and all the colors in between, and that’s actually something I really wanted to try to do. If you listen to this record now, you might experience it one way today and in a completely different way tomorrow, depending on how you feel. I wanted to strip away any reference to my personal experiences so that universal experiences could come through instead, ones that everyone could relate to.

Is the first record more based on your personal experiences, then?

Not really that one either, actually. I can’t really compare the two records, they’re two different stories, two different ways of recording, it’s true that it’s always me, but a lot of years went by between one record and the other and a lot of things changed.

Speaking of rainbows, a rainbow has seven colors and the record has seven songs…

True, I hadn’t thought of that.

About that number of songs, records today usually have more than that, but I thought you probably wanted to include only seven so that the listener wouldn’t get lost over such a long stretch, you probably didn’t want the listener to…

… get bored?

No, I didn’t mean get bored, just that they might risk losing focus, start thinking about other things.

I never really thought about this seven-songs thing, I chose what I felt was the best material I had and then I realized it added up to seven songs and 33 minutes, and I thought to myself “oh, that’s short, but I can’t add anything else because it feels right as it is”. Having seven songs and a short record was a consequence of how the work turned out, not a starting point I set out from. The concept developed as the work progressed.

What can people who know your records expect from your live shows? Are you faithful to the studio versions? What kind of line-up do you have?

It depends on the evening and the context. I’m very flexible, I can play as a duo, a trio or a quintet. The most important thing, for people who come to my shows, is that every time is a different experience. Tonight, for instance, there are two of us and we’ll have a setlist, which I’ll write in about an hour, and it will only serve to map out the different stages of the journey, but we don’t know how we’ll get there. We don’t know how we’ll move from one stage to the next, it’s different every time. Even what the sound engineer and the lighting person will do is improvised, everything is built during the show itself. It’s as if we were traveling on a great ship, so we know where we need to end up but not exactly how we’ll get there.

So then live there isn’t the defined context you were telling me about for the records, or is there the same level of structure, within which you improvise?

It’s a different context, but the live one is also well defined. For the record there are melodies, rhythm, atmosphere, chords, lyrics, and here the idea is that through the songs we have to build a story together and it’s a very intense thing.

Have you ever thought about the musical tastes your listeners might have? Because I, for instance, usually listen to traditional songs, with verses and choruses, and I don’t listen to jazz at all, but I still found your record interesting; on the other hand, there could be someone who only listens to jazz but might still find the record interesting. Have you ever thought about that?

When I’m making music I feel like a child who’s been given a sheet of paper and some crayons to draw with, and who simply enjoys what they’re doing without thinking about it. You don’t always expect the child to produce a finished drawing, you imagine them just sitting there having fun without thinking. In the same way, I make this music because it’s what comes naturally to me, I don’t think about who might like it and who might not, it would be impossible for me to make music while thinking about those things.

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