Subsonica - A volcano in the shadow of the Mole

Can you give us a preview of the sixth chapter of the Subsonica adventure? What direction is it taking? Not a trivial question, given your trajectory: after the declared rock turn of "Terrestrial", with "L'eclissi" you went back to a heavily electro-driven sound.

"You didn't manage to top Microchip Emozionale", you sing: beyond the self-irony, what do you expect – from a purely artistic standpoint – from this record?

What's fair to expect from Subsonica fourteen years into their story is an album able to condense the subterranean churn of the most recent electronic music and the wave of eclecticism running through much of today's interesting "indie" output, into a solid form of songwriting. From us, as indeed from most Italian bands, people demand songs. In our case, songs that escape genre clichés but are still ready to be danced to in front of thousands of people under a stage. Which, if you think about it, is a stylistically more constraining condition than playing in some small club staring at the tips of your shoes.

Right now there are more than fifty ideas born of an uncontrolled eruption, waiting to be assessed, paired up with each other, and maybe even understood a little. Then we'll move on to the lyrics and to choosing the instruments and tones needed to bind everything together. Multi-handed songwriting needs a settling phase, and that's exactly where we are right now. What's certain is the desire to let in more air compared to the dark, if prophetic, tone of the previous Eclisse.

Despite the growth and the changes in direction, I believe the first album already contains the whole of your very personal signature, your "anomaly". By skilfully blending sounds and suggestions with a modern, international flavour, constantly balanced between a vintage taste and dancefloor explosions, you've effectively identified a genre, filled a void. Do you recognise yourselves in this reading? How much of this "anomaly" came from a precise idea? How much of what you are now was already in your head when you laid the foundations of the project, and how much is the result of the band's collective creative dimension?

At the start there was really nothing precise at all. Not even the idea that we should be a real band, meaning with a stage line-up and everything that goes with it. I had left Africa Unite with some disappointment, one step away from a Polygram deal, and what I wanted wasn't really a band so much as studio experimentation, which is why I got in touch with Samuel, a singer with technique, a will to put himself on the line, and enough curiosity to let himself be guided. What happened from there on was the sum of the expressive needs of five musicians who were passionate about the sonic revolutions going on in the Nineties. In that sense, my previous work as a producer proved decisive in blending, at least musically, the different personalities involved.

On our own, for that matter, I don't think we'd have gone very far. I would have ended up in a full-blown artistic short-circuit, producing experimental material just for myself. Samuel and Boosta would probably have taken the fast track to some record executive doling out fame and success (they still existed back then!), only to burn out within a season, as happened to almost all their peers. Ninja would have stopped playing to put his computer engineering degree to use, as he was actually about to do before giving the nascent Subsonica one last chance, in between a tour in Brazil with Vanoni and a few uninspiring stints in the recording studio. As for the old bassist Pierfunk, well, he chose not to fully believe in it, only to try sneaking back in years later through the back door with Motel Connection.

Back at the time of the first Subsonica, in '96, all it took was going out at night, walking into one of the many clubs in Turin that were just starting to spring up in those years, keeping an ear open, and getting systematically struck by something innovative. Then going back into the studio the next day wanting to start everything over from scratch. No nostalgia, mind you, but it's true that back then music was thrilling and central to everyone's life. And I'm not just talking about musicians. I'm very fond of Subsonica and all its naivety, but trying to remake that album, so much a child of its own time, five more times over would have been a mistake.

The impression one gets from outside, following you, is of an authentic, genuine, passionate band. You can sense the desire to play together, but also the presence of problems, arguments, misunderstandings. Has it been, and is it still, difficult to keep the machine together? Have there been delicate moments over the years?

From Pooh to U2, I think that for anyone who's been playing together for a long time, the fundamental issue in being able to carry on with dignity has to do with seeking out new drives and new meanings. Today, in 2010: what are your drives, and Subsonica's?

The journey, in many ways priceless – the kind that's worth a whole lifetime – has at times been difficult and painful. Our story quickly reached heights none of us would ever have imagined. But heights easily turn into vertigo: the fear of making the wrong move, or of not being able to properly handle what's happening, together with the centrifugal dynamics typical of any band – the various solo careers, the intrusion of professional flatterers drawn by success who end up doping the authenticity of relationships, dealings with radio, TV, record labels, sponsors, purveyors of every kind of distraction for individual members, and the whole repertoire of clichés found in every rock-pop biography – have personally kept me up at night many, many times. Too many.

I have to say, though, that there's a deep bond holding us together. And it's a bond the outside world can't really understand. Everyone who's tried to leverage our differences or momentary rifts in order to steer our choices has, surprisingly, ended up burned and out of the game. The primary drive has to do with the harmony and sense of well-being that suddenly arises when we find ourselves doing the thing all of us do best in life, which is music. Net of all the bullshit.

I've always been pleasantly surprised by your (and your own) ability to keep direct contact with the audience that follows you, despite its exponential growth over the years. You were in fact among the first to use the web as an immediate interface with users, showing a special attentiveness to the people on the other side. With such a broad spectrum of listeners (Frankie Hi Nrg used to say: "We have to win over the whole riviera crowd and a few social centres too"), who tell you everything, and comment on everything, for better or worse, isn't it complicated, and perhaps pointless, having to answer to nearly everyone about your identity and your choices?

If, in order to stay in touch with the people who follow us, we had to choose between the artificiality of a TV broadcast, the lobotomy of radio playlists, the crude simplifications of much of the press, or the sometimes exhausting and thankless back-and-forth with people online who are used to splitting hairs (and not only hairs) over every line you write, we'd still choose the latter. That said, we've probably sometimes gone overboard trying to interact, explain, recount things down to the smallest detail, just as we have in voicing opinions well beyond the boundaries of our role as musicians. Still, the growing number of contacts, which by now exceed a hundred thousand on Facebook alone in its most recent form, tends to show us that people end up growing fond of those who put themselves on the line. Not only with instruments in hand. Even when they don't agree with everything you think.

Subsonica were among the standard-bearers of the "glorious" Italian independent scene of the Nineties, centred around Mescal, Cpi and the like. What made that experience possible? Today the reference points are outfits like La Tempesta, representative of a different spirit but above all of a progressive delocalisation that's revolutionising the very concept of "scene". What has really changed in Italian indie music over these notorious Noughties? And does it still make sense to think of music as tied to a specific place (as Milan might have been in the Eighties and Nineties, or your own Turin)? In your case, how has musical Turin changed over these years?

Mescal, aside from the problems almost every artist had with Valerio Soave, was, beyond representing a great opportunity for many of us, the symbol of a wonderful era. Still, experiences like that one, or like Consorzio, couldn't be repeated today, at least not on those terms. Waning interest in buying albums has pushed the whole music industry towards different forms of profit: merchandise, ringtones, TV talent shows, for which renewing musical language is no longer essential. The fact that the head of one of the biggest record labels has now left his post to go work on a talent show says more than any other consideration could. The indie labels of the Nineties used major-label resources to put their artists in a position to compete on the same terms of visibility as mainstream music. That was true for us, for Cristina Donà or Afterhours, but, to give you an idea, on a different scale it was also true for someone like Aphex Twin, who without Chris Cunningham's expensive videos would never have developed the revolutionary power we now know him for.

Today anyone making music inevitably does it out of expressive urgency, out of necessity. Things are coming full circle, more or less back to the early Eighties, when music was simply a matter of "life or death". And in fact venues are filling up again with live shows. After a fairly forgettable decade, we're also going back to listening to good albums. I have to say I didn't love the 2000s at all, or the generation of "everything is owed to me". Whereas I feel completely at ease with musicians in their twenties, in whom I recognise drive, generosity and courage that their older siblings often lacked.

In Turin the scene's ongoing regeneration is really interesting. It all develops, more or less, around three circuits. In the multi-ethnic San Salvario district, home to the city's student boheme, a curious form of singer-songwriter music has emerged. Among its leading figures: Matteo Castellano, Deian, Vittorio Cane and other visionary, disenchanted songwriters whose songs bounce between Myspace and sites like www.torinosistemasolare.it (where you can download the compilation "San Salvario da mezzanotte alle quattro" for free) or get played in the area's small, Greenwich Village-style venues. Alternative rock (to use an iTunes-style label) is instead right at home at Spazio 211: a genuine underground outpost on the outskirts, whose flagship acts include DiD, Stearica, Movie Star Junkyes and Discodrive. The same names turn up on the bills of venues across half of Europe, and often in the States too.

Just as interesting things are happening in electronic music. Behind enigmatic names like "Vaghe Stelle", "The Licious", "Postal M@rket", "X-luve", "Passenger", "Abstract", you'll find very young producers equally at ease with experimental electronics and with dancefloor-ready sounds. Il Puddhu at the Murazzi and the "China Surprise" night are the epicentre of this small school. Then there's LN Ripley, with our own Ninja on drums (according to the whole scene, the best live drum'n'bass band on the planet), and Ezra, a producer poised between rhythmic cross-pollination and oblique pop, rounding out a scene as alive and intense as it hasn't been in years. Something tells me that, even though things tend to happen a little earlier in Turin, the same thing is happening more or less everywhere else too.

You've been signed to a major label for five years now. These days you hear all sorts of things about the state of health of the music multinationals. How do you view the crisis in the record industry (in Italy and elsewhere), and how much has it weighed on your experience as a musician? Don't you think that, more than the advent of the internet and compressed audio files, what really caused it was the clumsy, fearful response to these new technologies? What possibilities do you see for the future?

Beyond the timeless, irreplaceable live show, the possibilities for the future are right there in front of us every day, the moment we open a laptop and update ever more complete software for sound, graphics, photography, video editing... It's fair to expect that among so-called "digital natives" a kind of "renaissance" scene will soon develop, made up of artists able to use different expressive techniques simultaneously. The concept of the avant-garde has always had to do with breaking down disciplinary boundaries, and spaces like YouTube — but perhaps even more so the new "containers" like the iPad or mobile phones — will be so hungry for multimedia "content" that they'll soon make the need for a traditional record industry a thing of the past. And who better than kids who grow up handling the endless creative possibilities of their own PC on a daily basis, plugged in real time to all the small underground revolutions, to put those possibilities to good use? Obviously all this will depend on the cultural climate. Which is why, rather than asking ourselves whether or not to mourn the ruins of a now-dead system, we should focus on the broader cultural battle, because that's the one worth winning. And it certainly won't be won by would-be ministers, local councillors, media salons, or most editorial desks as we know them today. I've gone off topic. I know.

News broke just a few days ago of your appearance at the Sziget Festival. It's an extremely prestigious stage, and you'll be facing a genuinely representative sample of a worldwide audience. Do you have any particular, different ideas for that date, or will it be the same formula that's taken you around Italy? How have your other recent experiences abroad gone? Do you believe more in quality Italian music made for export, or in Italian music sung in English that's able to compete on a European and global level?

That's a great question — the second one, I mean. As for the first, I think we'll bring back the live set we already road-tested on our previous run of European venues (London, Brussels, Madrid, Barcelona, Ibiza), that is, a show built around our more dance-oriented side, which is also, incidentally, something associated with Italianness. Besides, there are very few bands on the international scene who blend rock instrumentation with a dance attitude and still come across as credible and engaging on stage — apart from Soulwax, Lcd Soundsystem, Who Made Who and not many others. So that's where we look for our own space, to avoid being written off as just another bunch of Italians cloning someone else's sound.

As for Italian music abroad, I'd say that on one hand we're heading towards a cultural and linguistic unification of Europe, so sooner or later Italy too could earn the kind of recognition given to Belgium, Germany or the Scandinavian countries as a place with full rock credentials. There's certainly no shortage of bands. On the other hand, the language issue is all too often something we ourselves raise before anyone else does. Italian is a cool language, certainly cooler than Spanish and at least on a par with French. It's up to the quality of the sound, and the personality and character of whoever writes in Italian, to break free from the clichés of tricolore music. From my own point of view, even before Subsonica I'd already done several world tours playing with Africa Unite, or working the mixer with the first incarnation of Mau Mau. We sang in Italian, and sometimes in Piedmontese, without the audience ever having the slightest problem with it.

Casasonica.it is still online, but hasn't been updated in two years. What happened with the bands under contract, if you can tell us? And how do you feel looking back on that record-label experience: would you do it all again? Did something go wrong, was it a failure, or did certain circumstances simply lead things naturally to this outcome? What does Casasonica mean today?

Casasonica as a label, in practice, no longer exists. It might be worth looking at the mistakes, because there were some, as well as the positive aspects of the experience, because there's something significant there too. First and foremost, my fundamental mistake: not demanding from bands on their first release the sacrifice and patience needed to pay their dues. That is, the phase in which you pour all your energy in without any certainty of a return — for me that lasted at least 15 years before things changed. I felt embarrassed insisting to these bands that they should play as much as possible, everywhere, with or without proper equipment, even for a hundred euros, sleeping in a van if need be. I felt uncomfortable because at the same time I was filling arenas, sleeping in comfortable hotels and travelling in a camper van with a PlayStation and DVDs. Hence the attempt to book their shows only under certain conditions, renting transport and accommodation, which ended up draining a huge amount of resources. A band like Petrol had got to the point of demanding backline gear from their very first date.

Another miscalculation: failing to realise, in time, that the Nineties had long been over and that the Lenten austerity of the 2000s was about to reach its bleakest point: poor turnout at concerts and zero interest in new bands. I mean, it's not that we expected to sell albums, but we did expect that fairly quickly some band would start killing it live — that much we'd have taken for granted. The single most damaging factor was certainly the overlap with Casasonica/management, driven by manager Alessandro Chiapello, who was decidedly more interested in handling already-established artists — first Afterhours and Baustelle, later Niccolò Fabi and Arisa (and at that point I understood there was no more story to tell). In practice, the more underground level of the factory/label — the one I cared about — was putting out albums, running communication workshops like newsonica, nurturing visual artists and experimenting with forms of web-based communication, creating the habitat for cross-genre bands like LnRipley to form, for albums like "Gatto Ciliegia" and "Robertina" and so on. Meanwhile the more managerial level ignored all of that to focus solely on ventures with more gratifying visibility. There's still a fairly heated back-and-forth going on between me and Chiapello, trying to work out how to bring the whole experience to a close.

You were also the creator and driving force behind another key event for the city of Turin: the Traffic Free Festival. What's your assessment, six years on from the first edition? I think that in Italy Traffic can be considered a unique event, in terms of both production and what it offers. Is this the road Italian live music should follow? What's the recipe for exporting it to other parts of the country?

If a recipe exists at all, it lies in really interrogating what a festival (shall we call it a rock festival?) means in times like these. Above all, in questioning the difference between a simple, more or less varied succession of bands on a stage — which would be more accurately called a showcase — and the necessary "dimension" a real festival needs. Elements like being completely free of charge, the search for guiding principles on which to build and justify artistic choices, the drive to explore, in a genuinely multidisciplinary way, everything that comes bundled with music — through film, graphic and visual communication, a clash with literature — all tend to give the "event" back a more complete, more fulfilling role. Want to get our hands dirty with the deeper motives behind it? Fine: call it "spiritual".

As far as Italy goes, what I can tell you is that raising a point like this at the table of any cultural administration immediately produces irritation, if not yawns. Here in Turin, the experiment was attempted mainly because I was willing to put my reputation on the line and risk getting crucified for it. Instead of that, what we got were results: in numbers, in international feedback, in promoting the city and the region in terms of image, and in the cultural recognition usually denied to youth festivals. Despite an investment level far lower than that of any other festival of comparable size, Traffic's magnitude is on a scale comparable to the biggest, most heavily sponsored events in the country.

You've never hidden your keen, passionate interest in civic engagement, through lyrics, on stage and online. With Subsonica, you've championed the cause of many genuinely tough associations and initiatives, recently Nonuke, Global Zero... Do you think the musician/artist is one of the last political and social communicators left standing? And here too, does Obama's experience (who had the backing of a very large part of the American artistic community) teach us, or should teach us, something?

I recently met Trevor Fitzgibbon, the inventor of MoveOn: the movement with five million votes behind it that first produced Obama's primary win, and then his victory at the White House. And I realized that if a Seattle rock fan, passionate about civil causes and armed with the kind of empathetic sensibility that the experience of music gives you, can manage to do what he's done - and moreover keeps doing, with the "Global Zero" campaign on worldwide nuclear disarmament responsible for the most recent US-Russia agreements - then a lot of things are possible. Trevor came to Casasonica after a Turin conference on activism and social networks, because he'd heard about Subsonica and their commitment, but above all because of www.torinosistemasolare.it, which I help run. Intrigued by a clip ("Mafia spa") made in collaboration with Libera on the relationship between the mafia and cocaine use, he wanted to understand what kind of cross-cutting network was behind it and how this strange, self-managed city network operated. A network made up of student associations, musicians, nightlife venues, anti-mafia associations, visual artists and so on, all committed to redesigning the city. He showered us with compliments and took away a good deal of material with him, along with a few Subsonica CDs.

This gratification (a genuinely important one) teaches us that things simply need to be done, that we shouldn't get lost in empty talk and hot air, and that above all we shouldn't wait around for politics so much as get ahead of it, raise its awareness, steer it. Perhaps through small, everyday local utopias, capable of resetting goals and a sense of belonging. Music - not just its protagonists but above all its venues - can truly do far more than we think.

You're someone on the front line when it comes to your city's cultural policies; for your projects I believe you've maintained, and still maintain, relationships with politics and decision-making circles. If you were the one holding the pen to sign off on decisions, what urgent measures would you take today for music?

I'd do something unthinkable, radical, extremely revolutionary, something nobody - not even Veltroni, with his much-touted music program - has ever thought of doing. I'd talk to musicians. The real ones, though, not people like me who already have a profession, nor those picking up an instrument for the first time who already have a thousand showcases for emerging bands at their disposal - which is basically all that local authorities manage to offer.

I'd talk to those who are trying to make music their life and who perhaps need simple, achievable things like a sponsorship office run by their local council that works hard to get them a van, or a space where they can access legal advice to deal with their first contracts without fear of making a deal with the devil. At a national level, what's certainly needed is a simplification of taxes and bureaucracy, so people don't have to get tangled up with companies and accountants before they've even worked out whether their music could become a real job opportunity.

One last ritual question. What's spinning at least once a day on your iPod, PC, CD player or turntable?

Instrumental music, generally ambient, from Brian Eno to Murcof, but also rhythmic abstractions like Burial or Autechre. Maybe because I often deal with songs, I feel the need to decompress a little.

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