SikitikiS - Life Is a Jungle

They take their name from the Hawaiian god Tiki. They deal in unbridled rock and melodic lines somewhere between beat and retro.

Your new album is titled “B”, as in Plan B, B-list, B-side. Situations we've always considered a bit for losers, which you manage to turn into privileged ones: losers leverage their weaknesses to confront and defeat the enemy by catching it off guard.

We don't really know that. We hope to be able to turn them into privileged situations. More than a “B” of transformation, it's a “B” of admission, a tribute to a cultural and artistic world, but also to human existence, to that whole world hidden in the shadow of something else, always living on the flip side of the coin. The world of people who are always forced to get back up after a fall, and so face a new phase of life head-on. We believe this condition is very widespread and very current.

I don't think it's a stretch to say “B” is more mature than “Fuga dal Deserto del Tiki”. Was that maturity something that came naturally or something you were after?

Both, really: the need to evolve our sound came naturally, partly based on our live experience, and on what we'd been listening to, watching, reading. In the end we felt like taking on a new path. Fittingly, we approached that path with more experience behind us, so the result comes out more cohesive, more mature.

In a way it also seems to me that “B” has a touch more melody, that it's slightly catchier than the first album.

The search for melody was meant to make the album more “open” in terms of atmosphere, of breathing room, even though the chord progressions are technically darker than on the first album. The melodic openings strike the barrel after striking the hoop, trying to find a balance that would sound cohesive musically from start to finish.

I heard that “B” didn't have the easiest gestation.

Yes, because making records in Italy is madness. Only people with issues would make records in Italy: there's nothing nice, natural or fun about it. Making records is very draining. Both creating and conceiving them, and then finding a market for them.

All of this comes together into a great, even dangerous magma, because it can lead to rushed decisions and makes the gestation of an album very difficult.

That's how it went for us. The album came out at a very particular moment for the label, and we tackled every problem together, doing our part to help solve them ourselves. In the end, thanks to sheer relentless determination, we managed to get our album out.

“Pride also makes excellent toilet paper”.

(laughs) Do you like that line?

Very much!

Let's just say pride leads too many people to do a whole lot of stupid things.

"Onde Concentriche" is a duet with Robertina. Was that choice dictated by the label?

No. "Onde Concentriche" is a very old track, it's 6 or 7 years old. Through repeated listens, I had a few small revelations about how to develop it, and I understood that, at that moment, it wasn't a track for SikitikiS, but that it was a good track for Robertina, with whom I have a very strong bond of artistic and personal esteem. Over time, close to the recording, we realized that the track could work, and that it could work as a duet. I called Robertina and she, very willingly and very easily, made herself available.

This second album, just like the first, closes with an instrumental track. In this case the track is called "Le Grand Diable" and seems to be a tribute to you, since you don't sing on it. Actually, it's a tribute to Philip Lacroix, a character from the book "Manituana" by the Wu Ming collective.

It was a bit embarrassing, in the sense that the title of this track was decided directly by Wu Ming, so on my part there was a certain awkwardness in accepting a title that in some way recalled my nickname.

As it happens, chapter 32 of "Manituana" deals with a feat of Philip Lacroix, known as "Le Grand Diable". It's just a coincidence.

In "Fuga dal Deserto del Tiki", there's Mina's "L'Importante è Finire". In "B", Celentano's "Storia d'Amore".

"Storia d'Amore" has belonged to SikitikiS since before "L'Importante è Finire": the very first gig by the band – on December 6, 2000 – closed with a version of "Storia d'Amore", and we're talking about 6 arrangements ago.

When we gathered all the tracks we had available to decide which ones should make it onto the album, we wanted to close a cycle with this track, after many people had asked for a studio version. We decided to record it with a brand-new arrangement, one that had never even been played live before, and that we'll now bring back into our live shows.

A question I never thought I'd ask anyone: why Italian? With the sound you have, English would have been the simpler, more convenient choice.

The answer is in the question: because English would have been the simpler, more convenient choice. Generally speaking, we don't like simple, convenient choices. Italian is the natural language I write in, and that has to do with my deepest, most ancestral cultural heritage: I'm talking about the Italian music of the '60s and '70s that I used to listen to in the car with my mother as a kid. My passion for writing in Italian comes from there. Plus, I read in Italian, I think in Italian, I speak in Italian, I eat in Italian. Writing in English would have felt inconsistent.

How did you arrive at such a distinctive sound?

It took us many years. SikitikiS started in 2000, and yet between 2000 and 2004 live shows are extremely rare, because we used all that time as a laboratory. Of course, I'm telling you this with hindsight: at the time we didn't realize that's what was happening. It's clear that during those years a certain way of making music took shape, and there was also a kind of closing-off from everything going on around us: we shut ourselves in the rehearsal room, heads down and focused, and when we finally looked up we realized we had a sound that was distinctly our own.

Has being from Cagliari worked against you in some way?

Of course! Obviously! But it's not so much about being from Cagliari, as about coming from any Italian provincial city that isn't one of the cities where the music market and its mechanisms are concentrated, like Milan, Turin, and partly Rome and Bologna. Coming from the provinces is harder. On top of that, we have very high travel costs, which simply means we end up with less money in our pockets.

You've always had a strong visual identity, very close to noir.

A passion for cinema is the real glue holding SikitikiS together, the real catalyzing element for the musicians in the band, but also for writing and creating. For us, cinema is an excuse, a way of taking images and letting ourselves be inspired to the point of having to translate their atmosphere into music. Then there's the purely musical passion for the soundtracks of a certain kind of cinema that tends to be dark, tends to be criminal. We don't at all turn our noses up at great auteur cinema either: for me it's Tarantino as much as Fellini.

Among your performances there are also live scorings of films during screenings.

Yes, one of the activities we carry out musically, besides writing songs, recording albums and playing shows, is testing ourselves against the soundtracks and images of a certain kind of cinema that we particularly love. We did it by tackling five films by Elio Petri, four with Gian Maria Volonté plus "La Decima Vittima", which we scored for a production by Hiroshima Mon Amour (a historic Turin venue), and now we're getting ready to do our first live scoring of a thriller/horror film by Lucio Fulci, "Una Lucertola con la Pelle di Donna".

Isn't there a chance to take this kind of performance on tour as well?

Yes, that possibility exists, and so does the possibility of putting the whole thing on a format to release. The important thing is getting authorization to use the images, and that's not simple, because some of the directors of these films have died, so you have to track down their heirs or whoever bought the rights. The actual tour will happen once we manage to put together a cohesive show to take into theaters.

You debuted with an ironic video like "Non Avrei Mai", then doubled down with "Rock'n'Roll Contest". Weren't you afraid of getting stuck with an ironic image that doesn't really reflect who you are?

…I think that irony, in SikitikiS, is one of the background noises: we're definitely a band that likes a certain kind of nastiness, but we can never quite take ourselves completely seriously. Never. We have a strong, almost clownish instinct at certain moments, which comes out live too and that we can't manage to tame.

We accepted quite naturally when we were offered ironic videos, also because knowing the directors we worked with (Lorenzo Vignolo for "Non Avrei Mai" and Postodellefragole for "Rock'n'Roll Contest"), I knew it would never turn into an excessive video or one that could be misread. Plus, I think it's nice to lay out a path and even surprise people, to present an image of yourself only to then revise it or even overturn it completely.

We're all waiting for your new video. Tell me there's going to be one!

Yes, it's being delivered these very days! The single is "Al Primo Colpo" and it's a video where our involvement, including on the creative side, is a bit stronger. The idea, just like with "Non Avrei Mai", grew out of our close collaboration with the director, who in this case is Giuseppe Verlucca Moreto.

It took me several months to pronounce your name, and maybe I still don't get it quite right. Why SikitikiS? Was Sopralapancalacapracampa already taken?

(laughs) It's a name we came up with thinking mainly that we had to invent a word that didn't already exist: if you go online today and type "SikitikiS" correctly, it can only bring up something related to us. It was a choice meant to help clearly identify the band. And besides, it's a palindrome, and that fascinated us enormously.

The butler doesn't show up on your website. Meaning he's not the murderer? In that case, you're making things difficult for us!

Actually, on our website we're all butlers!

Touring soon.

Yes, starting March 20th we'll get back to testing the waters on stage while we wait for the more substantial dates, which will be the summer ones. Right now we're setting off to try out a new setlist in some pretty important places, venues with excellent acoustics, but there will only be a few dates.

And then there's this wonderful initiative by 2roads that we joined right away: house-concerts, small shows held inside private homes. It's something we find really fun, and we said yes immediately, with real enthusiasm.

(March 12, 2008)

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