St. Pangolin - From Catania with Noise

Davide Ianniti (violin, electronics), Claudio Palumbo (guitar, objects) and Simona Strano (guitar) play everything you'll never hear on the radio: long improvisations built on screeches, clangs, agonizing clashes and swellings, feedback, electronic froth and screams scattered into chaos. Their debut is a double album containing four tracks and exactly 120 minutes of music. A difficult record, but an extremely vital and fascinating one. We talked with them in search of the roots and the "meaning" of so much "devastration"…

Tell us a bit about how the St. Pangolin adventure began… And speaking of which: where does this moniker come from?

Davide: One summer day a couple of years ago, Claudio told me he wanted to start a noise band, and that he already had the name: St. Pangolin. The idea kept coming up sporadically, but nothing ever came of it. Then, in October of last year, Claudio quickly recruited Simona and we found ourselves in the rehearsal room, without even really knowing what to do (initially Simona was supposed to bring a ukulele and a kazoo…). We set up a microphone, but with no real ambition, and started "playing" in a rough, casual way, without even being all that satisfied. We were almost ready to call it quits, pretty disappointed. Then, out of nowhere, came what is now the first track on the album (17'16"). In the end we sat in silence for a long time and realized we'd actually made something.

Simona: The definitive push came last year, October 2014, when the three of us were watching a gig we didn't like all that much… Claudio brought the idea back up. The idea for the band was, in a way, our response to something we didn't like. And pangolins are cute little animals, much mistreated, found in Southeast Asia.

Claudio: Personally I don't remember exactly when I proposed this to the guys. But I do recall it was a time when I wanted to start a noise band just to make some righteous racket and have a bit of fun, and that I was fixated on the name St. Pangolin for who knows what reason. The day before I'd probably wanted to start a dark-ambient project and call it Flop Jesus. With the Pangolins, it worked out.

Your approach to noise, at once physical and intellectual, reminds me of the work of AMM, Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", Dead C, Throbbing Gristle, Blowhole, Airway and so on. Do you feel like children of this tradition?

D.: Personally no, but that's more out of ignorance than by choice! What we are, or what we seem to be, doesn't come from any intention on my part to imitate or repeat things done by others.

S.: When we started we didn't even know what we were starting to do, we had no idea what sonic chaos would come out of it. Personally, in fact, I was thinking of something more "canonical" and melodic, maybe drawing on noise and post-hardcore straddling the '80s and '90s. Someone told us that, at times, we could sound like the children of the Japanese group Incapacitants. If we are children of that tradition, it's almost by chance, by instinct.

C.: Noise as a means of expression has always fascinated me. I've listened to, hungrily devouring, all the bands you mention and plenty of others too (I'm very fond of Torturing Nurse, Wolf Eyes, good old Merzbow, Red Crayola, Fat Worm of Error, Flying Luttenbachers, Happy Flowers, right up to Xenakis or MacLise). Still, I don't think we're directly the children of anything, or that there's any attempt on our part to emulate or pick up that tradition. If you're restless and you happen to meet an equally restless old man on the street, he doesn't necessarily have to be your grandfather.

The freedom with which you handle sonic material made me think of what Bruce Russell of Dead C used to say when, talking about free-noise, he claimed that a) what lies beyond music is noise; b) what lies beyond rules is free. Have St. Pangolin also developed an aesthetic of noise?

D.: We've never tried to define our aesthetic at a desk. If anything, we've spent a lot of time listening back to, discovering and interpreting what we did in the rehearsal room. We always come out of our sessions in a state of near-total muteness and amnesia, and when we listen back to what we recorded we're often very surprised. In a way, I think that can be my strongest confirmation of points a and b.

S.: The only thing that matters is that every session is spontaneous and can never be reproduced live again. We've perhaps unconsciously tried to make the physical copies into "art objects", creating them by hand: they're unique sounds that can never present themselves to the world again. As for rules, only I occasionally follow traditional rhythms and chords: Davide and Claudio are completely untethered from that kind of logic.

C.: "Noise" definitely offers more creative possibilities than "melodic music", it can move more freely, but absolute freedom doesn't always translate into something better. When we shut ourselves in the rehearsal room to play, we never impose a scheme or a sonic structure on ourselves, we let instinct guide us. But there's also a very strong impulsive urge, in the middle of that abstract chaos, to try to follow a shared flow and stay latched onto a sound or a backbone. I think the greatest alienation comes from realizing that you're not in a solipsistic noise chaos, because the monsters you're conjuring up look just like those of your bandmates, albeit with different personalities. Russell says that beyond music there's noise, but beyond noise there's silence; one of the things that has struck me most about St. Pangolin is that after a long session of extreme racket, the silence that comes at the end becomes truly far more unbearable than any amount of grating din, and it gives you an enormous sense of "absence", a sinister emptiness.

Picking up on what Simona said ("The only thing that matters is that every session is spontaneous and can never be reproduced live again"), I have to ask: every time you play live, do you "always" do new things? And do you always record everything?

D.: The only thing we know before we start playing live is how much time we have available. As far as I'm concerned, I start the stopwatch and "wake up" at irregular intervals, almost always surprised that so much (or so little) time has passed since the last time I checked the clock. Whatever we do in that time is always new, always unexpected, always a surprise even for us. The idea of even just finding patterns to fall back on live strikes all of us as particularly like cheating (can you say that?). And in any case, unfortunately, so far we've never recorded one of our live sessions, but it's a great idea for the future.

S.: I kind of like the idea that what happens live disappears into thin air right away! The concept of sound arriving, dissolving, and leaving no trace or precise memory behind is extremely fascinating. In the studio it's easier. You just plug in a few cables and it's - almost - done. A lot of people, though, have asked us to record authorized "bootlegs" (fancy word!) and distribute them. Who knows, we could take a cue from those great gentlemen called Einstürzende Neubauten and hand the audience the recording as soon as the show is over.

While you're improvising, how much importance do you give to what the others are playing? Is there more interaction or more devastation?

D.: A huge amount of importance, for me. I always try to "get inside" what Simona and Claudio are doing, to "tune" the synths to them. If you consider that everything we do is completely improvised, the synergies that emerge are sometimes truly surprising. Beneath the surface chaos that characterizes our music, if you listen closely, you can hear a lot of interplay.

S.: Interaction, above all. As Davide says, the chaos is only skin-deep: I'd say we're coordinated in our devastation. We often catch each other's eye and sync up keys or rhythms. As Claudio said earlier, at the end of every session we find ourselves in silence, out of breath, eyes glazed over, ears ringing: the synergy keeps going even with the amps switched off.

C.: Devastation

Your jams are tortuous but also conclusive, sharply defined. While they're unfolding, what are you aiming for? A perceptual effect like the musicians of classic psychedelia sought, or do you just let your imagination wander according to the mood and temperature of a given moment?

D.: We didn't really know what we were doing the first time we walked into the room, but I think we keep playing precisely to recapture the feelings of that day. We ended up doing a real "group therapy" session that, ever since, we've all badly needed. For us it's a bit like being passed through and thoroughly cleansed by the music/noise we create together, and the length of our sessions really amplifies that effect. Since there's not even the faintest trace of a script, the "meaning" of our jams emerges entirely from how we lead and follow one another at the same time. Thinking back on it, it really is an unlikely way of doing things, but somehow it works.

S.: We're not aiming for anything very different from letting off steam: that's why we started playing in the first place. Wandering and digressing seems like the best thing to do, precisely because sticking to predefined scripts would go against the idea of spontaneity the band is devoted to. We mentioned "Metal Machine Music" earlier: Lester Bangs said those sounds came from every nerve in the body venting itself, concentrated into one single, huge "gland": in a way, I think our project could be seen through that definition, with all the limitations - and humility - that implies.

C.: I think it's more a matter of the feelings and impulses of a given moment, though it can also happen that before going into the room I get fixated on an idea of a sound that then, very often, changes completely during the session with St. Pangolin. I also like the moments when my imagination stalls and I don't quite know what to do.

The album was recorded live at Boxsound Garage in Catania. Was that a coincidence, or is it really in the live dimension that your music develops most coherently?

D.: We probably don't have any other dimension, even if ours is an atypical kind of live. We've never "rehearsed", not even for a minute. We've never tried to work out something to repeat later. I think that when we're shut in the rehearsal room we play with the same focus we'd look for on stage, while when we're on stage we hold on to the intimacy and "warmth" we have in the room, and it's really nice that this comes across to the audience too.

S.: We call our rehearsal sessions "therapy" (live shows too, for that matter). We cut ourselves off from the world and afterwards we don't even remember what we did or for how many hours we played: the room turns into a real sound-cube, and there's no escaping it. Live, something might change, but we don't notice it, at least not right away. It's always interesting to see someone flee after a few minutes, while most of the audience stays for the roughly 45 minutes of the show (strictly timed!), lying down on the floor or staring at the ceiling with a dazed look. We don't really notice them, we barely see anything beyond the tips of our shoes and the pedals. Usually they tell us themselves what they did or felt, coming up to us after the show. Ultimately, wherever there are three amplifiers, that place automatically becomes consistent with our music.

C.: Personally, I think listening to the record at home is also a great way to experience it, sprawled on a couch with everything that entails. Buy the record.

Did you have other musical experiences before St. Pangolin?

D.: Yes, and quite different from one another too (and certainly very different from St. Pangolin!). Right now I also play with Loveless Whizzkid (guitar and vocals) and with Stash Raiders (EWI, violin, guitar). On top of that, I'm starting to get into recording - in fact these very days we're in the studio recording Claudio's third solo album - and since March I've thrown myself into setting up Hopeful Monsters Records, to give all these projects a common home.

S.: Apart from the classic band back in high school and messing around with a guitar in my room, I've always gravitated toward the "backstage" side of things: for the past two years I've been production assistant for Zanne Festival, I've been orbiting the world of webzines and press offices for even longer, and I also help out with video production for those madmen in Ground's Oranges. I've always been more of a consumer and behind-the-scenes worker than a musician.

C.: Yes: even though you'd never guess it from what we do in St. Pangolin, I've had a dirty lo-fi/punk singer-songwriter project under my own name (Claudio Palumbo "ExPugile") for a few years now, and it's even brought me some satisfaction. As Davide already mentioned, right now we're in the studio, together with a lot of other friends from the Catania scene, recording our third record, which will be called "Blank Iugoslavia". Then there's another project I care about a lot called Lazzaretto, a sort of collective (can you even call it a collective? who knows!) of friends or sometimes occasional passersby, with whom we play and record messed-up little songs using whatever means we happen to have at the time. Lazzaretto is an aborted idea, the mortification of a creative spark that nonetheless comes out in its most primordial form - which is maybe the only interesting thing about it. I think Almond Ice Director, the post-punk band I had with some friends, with whom we made an EP called "Pudenda", recently broke up. These projects will come out, or have already come out, on a kind of homemade label called Golden Catrame, a repository for amateur-spirited material meant to bring out into the open the musical scum that's normally overlooked (the EP by Perky Pat, a noise band I had a few years back, is coming out soon).

What are your influences, musical and otherwise?

D.: In no particular order: My Bloody Valentine, Yo La Tengo, Pavement, Fugazi, Slint, early Gong and Soft Machine, Guided By Voices, Amon Düül II, Charles Mingus, and early-90s video game music.

S.: When I'm playing, my inspirations are mostly musical: Sonic Youth, Big Black, Shellac, Nirvana, Germs, Fugazi, Hüsker Dü and so on. The tight rhythms are a sort of personal tribute to Steve Albini, while the feedback control comes courtesy of Kim Gordon and her Body/Head, a project many tend to dismiss but which for me is a symptom of the personality and physical presence of Woman in music.

C.: I'll just fire off some names at random: Jandek, No Wave, Boyd Rice, Half Japanese, Melt Banana, Chrome, Six Finger Satellite, Cccp, Minor Threat, Black Flag, Young Marble Giant, Beat Happening, Flipper, Mission of Burma, Death in June, Butthole Surfers, Cranioclast, Laghetto, Blue Vomit, Swans, Fall, Tyvek, Psychedelic Horseshit, Almost, Meat Puppets, Einsturzende Neubauten, Matt Brinkman, Xander Marro, Pixies, a handful of shoegaze bands, Pere Ubu, K.K. Null, Black Dice, and Delta Blues. Then also Villiers de l'Isle-Adam, Mark Twain, the people having sex upstairs, and Brueghel. Broadly speaking, a whole lot of things influence me, but I don't think I pay it too much mind.

What's your relationship with the Catania scene?

D.: Even if it sounds politically incorrect, I think the Catania scene is an incredibly fertile field that's now been covered for years by the burnt-out carcasses of scrap metal. Every so often you catch a glimpse of unsettling shadows of fairly pointless competitiveness that has little to do with music. In any case, thanks to our various collaborations, musical and otherwise, outside of St. Pangolin, we all have good relationships with plenty of people in the "scene". With ups and downs, of course.

S.: The relationships are good, if you can even call it a scene. The situation isn't as disastrous as Davide makes it sound, but sometimes you get bands appearing - or reappearing - made up of teenagers or forty-somethings who get inexplicably showered with praise by everyone, even though their cultural background is basically zero and all they do is copy, half-copy, rehash... only to sign it with their own name and self-celebrate as prophets of the new millennium. Catania is a strange place: sure, it has some 300,000 inhabitants, but the ones who actually "make" the real scene are always the same. Then along come these flash-in-the-pan intrusions that, in my opinion, only do damage. I'm always pretty opinionated about this. Forgive me!

C.: Catania is a bizarre city - I think there's also a lot of potential that occasionally surfaces, creating some genuinely interesting situations. I think that despite the stupid rivalries and pointless small-time star complexes, we're in a period where something good is emerging. In the end, the people who make up "the scene" are, and always have been, the same people, and I'm quite close to a lot of them. It's no coincidence that for my solo records (especially the latest one I'm making with Davide), I called in a lot of friends, mentors, and older siblings of the scene to give me a hand. Obviously, it has to be said it's not all roses - Catania also has its fair share of hopeless idiots... but maybe that's just normal.

What do you do once you've put the instruments back in their cases?

D.: I do plenty of nice things: I play with several other people, I run a rehearsal space that I'm trying to turn into a recording studio and that I'll have to gradually clean up and renovate; I try to record records and often even release them on my own label, Hopeful Monsters, so I end up banging my head against SIAE, print shops, and Bricoman to get everything I need, then spend the nights putting them together (almost always with Simona); I try to imagine and design new synths and effects based on what I feel I'd need when playing them, and finally I try, rather fancifully, to make even just one of the things I've mentioned bring in a semi-decent income.

S.: First off, I tally up the damage: sunken pickups, torn-off saddles, destroyed strings. Then I go straight back to everyday life, which, 90% of the time, happens alongside Davide. Other than that, it's all a whirlwind of emails, press releases, boredom, ridiculous games and 9gag online, and tons and tons of episodes of Doctor Who. As for the struggle, it's always the same one: finding a job that isn't seasonal!

C.: Mostly, I wander around the city. Every now and then I do some dog-sitting, and I'm currently curating a series of concerts and exhibitions in the Catania area. For a couple of years now, inspired by my bassist, who's an illustrator, I've gotten back into drawing, and together with my friend Irenea we've formed a duo called Xanta Pece, making illustrations and posters. I'm also part of a videomaker collective called ShitBrio (with whom we also make music videos), which is a bit stuck at the moment. If I find the right motivation and manage to avoid falling out with everyone, maybe I'll go back to actively following Teatro Coppola, the occupied theater in Catania that I've been a bit at odds with lately. Then I read, go to the beach, and bug my friends. The rest can't be said.

Which albums did you enjoy in 2015?

D.: Did any records come out in 2015 for you?

S.: 2015 for me was a year of total alienation, more dedicated to live shows than to albums I actually listened to. So far I've liked the latest from Sufjan Stevens, “Endkadenz vol.1” (because it's nice to be a teenager forever), “A Long Period of Blindness” by Weird and “Season of K2” by PARBAT. Then there's the new EP by Loveless Whizzkid (Davide's main band): it'll be out in a few days and it's really incredible.

C.: At one point I kept playing the latest Thee Oh Sees on repeat: “Multilator Defeated At Last”. Then “Transfixiation” by A Place to Bury Strangers, a record with an unpronounceable title by Monkey Plot (“Angående omstendigheter som ikke lar seg nedtegne“, editor's note) and “Clip-o-matic Lips” by my friends Pelios. Anyway, I'm really not methodical when it comes to listening to records.

What will your next moves be?

D.: Since we don't have "songs" as such, for us "composing" basically means defining the sonic arsenal available to us the moment we shut the rehearsal room door or start the clock on stage. On one hand, we'll need to dig deeper into the possibilities of our current arsenal and keep improving our synergy; on the other, if we want to do something truly new, we'll need to explore new sounds, new approaches and new combinations.

S.: Play as much as possible, mainly in the rehearsal room. Who knows, maybe the next 3 albums will come out of that, just by chance.

C.: We hope to stir up some trouble around town.

Will you be playing live in the coming months?

D.: Apparently, the easiest way to play live, no matter what, is to put together a semi-acoustic cover band. So it'll be pretty hard for us, but we'll definitely give it a try.

S.: Hopefully! It's already hard enough for people who make more conventional music to play live: St. Pangolin aren't exactly easy to "place". So far we've always played in settings where what we do was almost taken as a modern art performance — we've been lucky. Maybe in the coming months we'll do something in Catania again. After all, our last live show was back in June...

C.: We hope so, maybe even outside Catania too. Who's going to organize us a nice tour of Canada?

(25/10/2015)

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