Umberto Maria Giardini - Moltheni - The Songwriter Who Lived Twice

Good morning Umberto. First of all, thank you on behalf of the entire OndaRock editorial team for sharing this moment with us. Your paths had already crossed with OndaRock back in February 2010, for an interview granted on the occasion of the release of "Ingrediente Novus", a best of featuring your tracks rearranged for the occasion. What has changed in you, if anything has changed, between then and now?

Umberto has changed, yes, exactly like everyone else, because the world has transformed enormously over these thirteen years. The world hasn't changed in form, but in meaning, and as a result I've changed too. The musical landscape has changed as well, and anyone who makes music in a way similar to mine has been, and still is, influenced by everything going on around them, even if artistically I believe I've still kept the image and awareness that has always defined me. That said, I can only acknowledge all the objective social, environmental, economic and ethical shifts that have developed in the meantime. To give a tangible example that touches everyone without exception, social networks have spread exponentially and, in my view, in a wholly negative way. We've become slaves to all these situations. Thirteen years ago that wasn't the case yet.

So you believe the web, social media, don't have any positive facets, any general usefulness within them?

No, absolutely not. It's not just me saying it, it's a matter of fact. The role of the network, of the Internet, even though it was conceived with commendable principles and, on paper, meant to bring only benefits, ends up, as always, like every invention or situation born from the human mind and thrown to humanity, being managed in a malicious way, entirely different from its original purpose. Let me give you an example. It's as if I invented a new food, a universal one, that could simply be created from the molecules in the air — I'm really just picking a random example. It would be an extraordinary creation. At first it would be seen purely and exclusively as a positive, useful discovery. But once it was put on humanity's plate, it would certainly be diverted, contaminated in some way, to the point of definitely producing negative consequences. And that's what the Net is like: it has destroyed our society. This stupid illusion that we're all equal. A universal piece of foolishness that mankind chose to impose on itself through globalization, and the results are bearing witness to that. We are not all equal, and that's a good thing. Globalization was supposed to bring us total connection, with the possibility of instant communication, making us all more alike. It has failed spectacularly. We've isolated ourselves, we've become more hostile, more different. It's true, we can all be materially connected in a second, but it's not a real connection. Our brains are fried. Just take a smartphone out of someone's hands and, after a week, they risk suicide. How can they live without a phone? Let's be clear, myself included.

Human progress should be measured in the scientific field – for example in medicine, applied to treating illness, or in physics and astronomy, where mankind has made unimaginable advances. Beyond that, technology has done nothing but push human beings a long way backwards. Everyone's got a phone in their hand, but not everyone is capable of, say, growing themselves a vegetable garden to produce something to eat. People aren't even able to light a fire anymore. Any one of us, left in a forest, would be dead within two days. Human beings need to be repositioned according to what they're actually worth today, which is very little. In the hierarchy of our planet, which is brutally sick, the only ones who can aspire to occupy the top spot are animals, creatures we humiliate every single day. Human beings have never sunk as low as they have in this era.

How am I supposed to think otherwise in a country where the only things that matter are money and cocaine? Everything else takes a back seat. That's just how it is: the baker, the pharmacist, the head of the local police all use it in the same way, it's no longer confined to some small caste, and the funny thing is that everyone seems fine with it. We're witnessing a state of general malaise that causes everyday disasters most people don't even notice, let alone ask themselves what's triggering them. These days the average Italian would sell out their own family for an extra hundred euros.

And let's not even get started on the ruling class. Over the last few decades we've had a crude, second-rate political class, starting with the left, which through sheer, culpable incompetence has driven the population towards the right. As a result, we can't help but be a mirror of our own society.

Sorry for the long digression, but going back to your question, you'll have understood by now that in my view, over the last thirteen years, we've taken too many steps backwards, extremely dangerous ones. We need a global reset.

Let's talk about your new album, “Mondo e antimondo”, which came out just a few days ago.

“Mondo e antimondo” is a very classic record, in the sense that it was built following conventional methods. These days there's always an attempt to wrongfoot and surprise the listener with all sorts of gimmicks, often pretty cheap ones. You just have to look at what's going on in today's music scene. Against the grain of everything and everyone, mine is a very simple album, one I recognise myself in quite well.

At this point, after your heartfelt preamble on the current state of things, the title you've given the album takes on an even clearer, decidedly symptomatic meaning. Judging by the lyrics of the title track too, it seems you wanted to reference all the contradictions of the modern age?

That's absolutely true, I can confirm it. I chose the title “Mondo e antimondo” precisely to symbolise the fact that life has taken that turn today. Everything has become the opposite of everything else. What until a few years ago seemed implicitly positive has now become its opposite. Now everyone cheers for the opposite. Nobody knows why. All values have gone to hell. Everyone feels entitled to do whatever they like, even the most wrong-headed things. The funny thing is that whoever commits terrible, ill-fated acts will sooner or later find someone to say that, in the end, what they did isn't really so bad. There's always some mitigating excuse to be found for everything. If I stabbed a child in the eye, out of a hundred people you'd certainly find twelve, eighteen, who'd say: sure, he stabbed a child or a girl, but every now and then you've got to get rid of these kids too, maybe he needed the blood for cooking, or maybe he was testing out a new brand of knives. That's how it is. Today everything has become the opposite of everything. And we don't push back. We watch the worst things happen and react by thinking that's just how the world is now. Well, “Mondo e antimondo” portrays exactly that condition. I'm aware it's decidedly provocative, and I'd be a hypocrite not to admit it, but that's exactly what I wanted it to convey. It's obviously a subjective view. I don't want to convince anyone, but being an artist is also a way to communicate your own ideas, and I won't deny that.

As usual, your albums and songs reveal a certain obsessiveness in the writing and in the final execution. Even on this latest LP there's a clear will to present a product polished down to the smallest detail, both in content and in sound. How did “Mondo e antimondo” come about?

“Mondo e antimondo”, believe it or not, is a record born from the ashes of a work that, in the end, I decided not to release.

A project you shelved because you weren't happy with the final result?

No. I scrapped it because I made the mistake of overworking it. It had taken on the shape of something I felt was already outdated, already digested. So I took it and, for now, shelved it, even though it was ready for release. We'll see what happens with it in the future. In any case, I didn't use any ideas from that record in making “Mondo e antimondo”. These things happen. You have to acknowledge it and have the courage to face situations like this when necessary, and decide accordingly.

With this choice you confirm that you're an artist with no fixed standards or imposed deadlines.

I'm a very emotional, sensitive person, and decidedly critical of myself. Had I carried on in that direction, I would have released a record that no longer represented who I was at that moment. To me a record is still a work of art. Once you release it, it stays that way forever, and so that unusual feeling I had – unfortunately a very real one – led me to the decision to dramatically reject it, going along with the reactions I was having at the time. I started everything over from scratch, and I'll tell you that the decision to open myself up to a new record came fairly quickly. I still belong to the camp of those who believe a record should be created and released when the author, or authors, feel the need to do it, without worrying about how many years have passed since the previous work, whether many or few. A perfect example of this is Alberto Ferrari of Verdena, who can quite happily let an indeterminate number of years go by between one record and the next.

And I'll add this too. In Italy there's a huge problem that practically nobody talks about: money. Many artists, not all of them thankfully, make records solely and exclusively out of need for money, not for any other, more admirable necessity. Not to mention the world of featuring. Records full of collaborations, touted as genuine artistic sharing and exchange, when really they're just gimmicks to sell more and keep the record labels happy.

You usually handle both the music and the lyrics of your compositions yourself. Following up on what we just discussed, this new album instead features several collaborations, such as the one with Cristiano Godano, Maestro Floriano Bocchino and Marco Marzo Maracas, with whom you'd already worked on the Pineda project. How did these come about, and how did you handle them?

As I told you before, I can't stand featuring credits, which are so fashionable in Italy, especially right now. The guest appearances on my record have nothing to do with that kind of logic. They're collaborations born first and foremost out of friendship, with people I care about. Of course the artistic weight of whoever gets invited onto one of my records carries a very specific meaning, but it starts from other premises that I consider far more important. Everything else comes after.

You arrived at this work after surprisingly resurrecting the Moltheni persona in 2020 with the album "Senza eredità". How much might that adventure, that unexpected decision, have influenced the writing of "Mondo e antimondo"?

That record brought together all the tracks from the Moltheni era that had never made it onto an album, like some B-sides or songs I performed live that a lot of fans kept asking me to finally put on a record. So we took the liberty of gathering all those tracks together on "Senza eredità". In any case, the new album wasn't influenced in any way by the decision to release a new Moltheni record. First of all because Moltheni died artistically in 2010, and secondly because that record had the sole purpose of satisfying fans and their requests. It was also a nice opportunity to bring back some collaborators who had shaped and defined that era. There's no connection whatsoever between the Moltheni project and Umberto Maria Giardini's path. They're two completely independent realities, and quite distant from one another too.

I've always wondered about this, and this is the best chance to clear up any doubt. From what you just said, it seems you're confirming that the two paths should really be considered as two firmly separate artists.

They are. They really are.

What were the real reasons that led you to decide to end your path as Moltheni and begin the one under your own name?

There's only one: money. There's a point in Moltheni's career, around 2009, which I won't shy away from calling the peak of that journey, when the people I call sharks, vultures, started circling around me. I was hugely let down by producers and collaborators. The work I'd built up over time was being contaminated by situations that were miles away from what I actually wanted, to the point where I decided to shut the project down for good. Personal principles that I held then, and still hold, as sacred and untouchable were being eroded. It had become something I no longer recognized, and yet I was the one who had to manage it and keep it going. Working and planning methods that were no longer what I'd envisioned. I've always worked the way things were done in past decades, up through the 90s, and that's where I stopped. Going beyond that, with different methods and different goals, wasn't for me. To me, being a musician, a singer-songwriter, still means picking up paper, pen, guitar, and spending long, long hours in the studio, in rehearsal rooms. Hours and hours, days and days of work. That's my world. Too many people were circling my dying carcass, which was actually alive and well, enjoying solid visibility and a certain economic importance. So I shut up shop. I fired myself. I'm the first one responsible for what happened, since I was the one who chose to surround myself with those musicians, those producers - some of whom went on to become very important and famous, others less so, because without me holding the whole thing together, they were never able to achieve anything significant again. I found it right, for my own sake, to question everything all over again. That's where the decision to end the Moltheni project came from.

In your lyrics you often refer to nature and to the primordial essence of the most practical actions that have shaped human existence. These references seem very strong in you.

I come from a Nordic cultural background, and by Nordic I don't mean Bergamo. In Nordic culture, respect and the way nature is viewed are quite different elements from how they're perceived in Italy. This is a feeling that has always accompanied me, and in some ways it's even become stronger. It's only natural that these concepts keep resurfacing in my compositions, because they're part of who I am. So yes, I absolutely confirm that.

In "Re", the track chosen to precede the album's release, as often happens in your work, you evoke visions from the past - it almost feels like you want to exorcise a present that doesn't convince you.

"Re" is a kind of somewhat rigid prayer about the idea that human beings should be brought back down to essentials. It's almost a mantra, delivered in a way that recalls Giovanni Lindo Ferretti a little. It's a pretext for reclaiming the simple things that belonged to people in past eras. Praying, working, having expectations about something that won't necessarily come true, bringing us back to a more human kind of life compared to the one we have now.

The video accompanying the track also evokes all these concepts.

Exactly. The video is deliberately very simple, shot outdoors. Just think, it cost only 700 euros, which confirms the underlying idea that needed to come through in the images as well.

In your lyrics, you manage to be communicative without necessarily having to spell everything out in an obvious way.

I'm convinced that art has to be translated. The real translation is the one each individual perceives, so there are millions of them. I like working this way, letting my ideas be carried by my lyrics, but leaving every listener free to draw their own conclusions, without it necessarily having to be seen in just one way.

You've always dodged the label of standard-bearer of Italian indie pop-rock. In truth, though, that's exactly what you are, it's a matter of fact. What does it mean today to still proudly carry the banner of someone who has never bowed to the star system, continuing to put forward your own message and your own music without outside interference, with an enviable consistency?

Standard-bearer of independent music? That's not really my issue. If anything, I don't consider it very important. Anyone who knows me knows I've always held the view that, at least in Italy, musicians should be brought down a peg. Italian audiences have a distorted view. I don't know if the public is easily swayed or simply so blind that it fails to notice that a musician is essentially just a person like anyone else, to put it mildly. I've always been firmly convinced that musicians should necessarily be repositioned for what they really are, in a truer, more realistic light.

Is that a view you've come to recently, or have you always thought this way?

I've always thought this way, and over the years that awareness has only grown. I see out there that people - and maybe they do it with me too - foolishly idealize whatever musicians say.

There are artists whose main communicative goal is exactly that.

True. The problem is that everyone out there ends up believing it. I obviously can't name names, but I know the Italian music scene very, very well, and we're talking about genuine icons here too. I can tell you, and confirm, that it's all a bluff, and the audience hasn't understood a thing. They don't notice anything at all. It's enough for them to see someone singing and shouting, and that person - and whatever they say - gets carved in stone like it's the tablets of Moses.

The melodies of your songs are always suspended in a kind of limbo that builds a great, magnetic anticipation, with wide-ranging references drawn from folk, from 70s hard-progressive, obviously from 90s indie-rock, and that ever-present touch of your beloved psychedelia. The new track "Andromeda" is a very clear example of this. Across its seven-plus minutes, on a psychedelic journey that's at times dark and enigmatic, you unfurl a hermetic, intense and captivating lyric. I was especially struck by the line: “Tartaruga vita mia rallentami/ Allontanami da chi mi chiede/ Di guardarti andare via”.

That line you're quoting starts from a fundamental feature of my life, one I'm extremely proud of. I love knowing that a part of me travels slowly and tries to stay tied to its roots.

Am I wrong, or do the songs on the album almost never have a happy ending?

That's just part of who I am. My discography has always been steeped in melancholy. And melancholy always leaves a bitter taste in your mouth.

In "Muro contro muro" you tackle the theme of love in an entirely personal way, as usual with rare elegance and depth, in a track I consider among the best on the record.

It's a song about a gay love, between two men who love each other, but one is much younger than the other, and that's where all the difficulties and obstacles come from that keep them from living out that powerful feeling in peace.

A song that, in melody and content, would have held its own in a setting like the Sanremo Festival. Would you go back after more than twenty years? Have you ever tried to enter again?

No, I wouldn't go back. Sanremo isn't the kermesse many people think it is anymore. Sanremo doesn't work the way it did many years ago. I tried to take part in 2013, but Francesco Sarcina was chosen instead of me. As things stand now, I wouldn't even dream of going back to the Festival, it would just be a waste of time. I know exactly how those dynamics work today, and there's no room for someone like me. Besides, I don't write songs with the goal of entering competitions, festivals, or various awards. That world doesn't interest me in the slightest. Even now plenty of people tell me that if I'd released "Mondo e antimondo" earlier in the year, I might have been in the running for some kind of recognition, the kind everyone knows about. I couldn't care less about that stuff. I give the right amount of importance to other things.

If I think about who took part in that Festival alongside you back in 2000: Tiromancino, Riccardo Sinigallia, Subsonica, Samuele Bersani, Max Gazzè, Alice, Avion Travel, Carmen Consoli, among others.

My friend, we're talking about a different world altogether. It's like thinking about tribes on the savannah. That era will never come back.

So, do you think the current situation isn't just a cycle, the way things tend to go in phases? Do you think the mainstream of Italian music will stay locked into its current state for a long time?

I'm not optimistic at all. The real market, the one that moves real money, is aimed exclusively at people under 26. I'm not joking. Anyone over 26 doesn't register on the listening figures anymore. For the Italian record industry, the audience over 26 isn't even a target - it's worth nothing. It's simply not taken into consideration. The major labels are complicit with the talent shows. So it's a fact. In the music industry's economic landscape, only the audience up to 26 years old gets tracked. We keep trying to force this idea of modernity that isn't actually real. That's not how it works. Let me give you a simple example. In Germany, if you walk through the streets of any city, concerts of every kind are still advertised on billboards. In Italy that's not the case. You have to get it into your head that in order to move forward, you sometimes need to look backward. I'm not saying we should all suddenly start listening to Toto Cutugno. I mean that for a broader vision, and to build a meaningful future, you need to look to the past, to reassess even the most ordinary things, with the right spirit. We've abandoned them because we're told they're out of fashion. It's like following an algorithm to make a soffritto. The world keeps turning even without these things. Wine is still made the same way it was hundreds of years ago. Technology should help refine production methods, not replace them entirely. We've gone too far. We've completely lost our bearings.

Do you see a new Umberto Maria Giardini/Moltheni anywhere on the Italian music scene?

No. Unfortunately not. Maybe there is one, but I haven't noticed.

With hindsight, judging your artistic journey today, do you think Umberto Maria Giardini deserved bigger success than he's had so far?

No. I believe that, given how things have evolved over the years and the decisions made at the time, I can consider myself both personally and artistically satisfied with my path, which has never involved compromise.

What albums have you listened to recently that struck you the most?

Please, don't ask me that. I have no idea about anything. I just keep going on my own path, which I think, by the way, is drawing to a close. I'm fifty-five years old, and honestly I don't see myself still on stage in ten years, so I'm trying to make the most of my last shots.

Are you about to go on tour following the new album?

Yes. The dates came out a few days ago. The tour will kick off in Turin on January 25, 2024, then continue through various cities. For now, between February and March the lineup includes shows in Verona, Bologna, Florence, Genoa, Rome, Pescara and Milan, but we're hoping to add more.

Congratulations again on your new work, which is always a privilege to enjoy. Thank you for the time you've given us, and see you next time.

Thank you, it was a pleasure. Warm regards to the whole editorial team.

(24/12/2023)

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