Thru Collected - Hyperpop of Free Thought

Thinking of them as a band, maybe calling them “the Thru Collected,” would distort the very essence of the project. And, all things considered, viewing them purely and simply as a musical entity would also be misleading. Nor is it age that defines them, given that the various ages of the artists involved range, more or less, from 18 to 30. The idea that best captures them, then, is that of a work in progress, of a collective understood as the evolving synthesis of experiences. A first key to approaching the imagery and aesthetic of Thru Collected can be found in the oblique, dystopian world of their short films such as “Dronememorie” and “The Great Lightning Bolt”. The city, nature, signs, bodies all seem to belong to a non-time (ours?) in which every possible disillusionment has already been experienced, including that of starting over from scratch, of promising a future or denying one. Too much has happened for words, signs, even music, to retain their old meanings.

Amid this kind of generalized uncertainty, overexposed and trivialized by the media and by an ever more repetitive set of artistic clichés, Thru Collected has found its own reason to exist and to resist. Their stance is not underground, not mainstream, not generational, doesn't align itself with any particular style, and doesn't reject any of them outright either. It all plays out on a deeper level. The question is which compromises are unacceptable, which rules of the game must never be bowed to. Hence the invention of a form of unison built on independence, in which authorship is not merely an individual matter but the result of a rhizome of expressive urgencies and disparate skills. There's music, there are installations, videomaking, event organization, marketing, graphic design. There's the ideology of Do It Yourself understood as productive self-sufficiency, allowing every member of the collective full control over their own creative processes.

The Naples in which Thru Collected was born is one still warped by the pandemic. And yet it's undeniable that within the virtual community — so often demonized by sociological literature — the untamable linguistic and musical roots of Naples find new ways to express their natural pull toward internationality.

“Discomoneta”, their debut in the musical field dating back to 2021, bursts in like a frontal attack on stereotypes. Rap, trap, neomelodico, indie, hyperpop, drum'n'bass, ambient, singer-songwriter, glitch and folk tradition chase and layer over one another, keeping the listener's attention constantly on edge. And it's no accident that “Cantautoraverz”, “Mullet” and “A voc ro padrone” are songs of huge impact, expressing Neapolitan spirit and cosmopolitanism at once.

Across every track, what stands out is the ability of Specchiopaura, Sano, Alice, Altea and the collective's other songwriters to depict youth, an artist's life and civil society, always tackling complexity head-on — indeed, seeking it out in order to turn it into something introspective, an emotion, an image, a more or less mental film. “Discomoneta” has twenty tracks, plus those from the four solo releases: “Non ti scordar di me” by Altea, “L'industria, il pop, la camera, il sesso” by SANO, “Naples undercore” by Specchiopaura, “Città dall'alto” by Alice. All without compromise. “Dici 'cantautoraverz'/Nuje stammo parianno, nn'ce ne fotte d''e labels” is their battle cry. But you can also change your mind if there's good reason to. Along the way comes a meeting with Bomba Dischi, the label that launched Calcutta, to give you an idea, which backs them in managing the potential of an album like “Discomoneta” without laying claim to any real control. It feels like a publishing and management story from another era. The relationship first takes shape through a tour on the independent festival circuit, from MI AMI to Indiegeno Festival, from Apolide Festival to Pinewood Festival, from Poplar Festival to Comicon. Sheltered, but not too much, in other words. Fair enough. All the more so since a tour of that kind in the post-Covid era was the first testing ground on which a successful label and an independent, atypical outfit like Thru Collected could find common cause and get to know each other better. The end of 2023 brought “The Great Lightning Bolt”, a generous, deliberately oversized tracklist. A full thirty tracks, all built on inspired songwriting and all worthwhile. Different from one another, yet held together by a shared idea of storytelling and performance, more than of sound. They're thirty pop tracks, but made of nuance, delicate balances, a myriad of details that make all the difference. Listening to them, absorbing them, letting yourself be won over is also a matter of curiosity and patience, but the effort is amply rewarded, and what takes shape is an original, powerful universe, never gratuitous. The content of “The Great Lightning Bolt”, even within a discourse that doesn't treat accessibility as an absolute value, manages to speak a universal language. Across the thirty tracks, the different components of today's musical infosphere are present in a kind of paradox that's truly worth betting on.

The idea was not to dwell on any specific narrative, but to try, in a way, to evoke metaphorical circumstances, staying on a plane parallel to reality. The great lightning bolt is an event that changes everyone's life, one that can be physical, inner, spiritual, geological. In the short film, the fact that nature is distorted and unpredictable pushes the characters to develop new methods both for communicating with each other and for interacting with this upended world. The boulders you see floating represent modern society, and therefore also our consumption habits, the fact that everything immediately becomes discarded waste. The jumble of electronic objects represents us, this world that runs on electricity. At the same time, the images allude to the need to face the unexpected together, even taking on the risk of falling all at once, as happens in the video with a pessimistic twist at a certain point. That fall represents the feeling of powerlessness in the face of systems that are, at the same time, so imposing and so much in crisis.

Given that the video interpolates, within its narrative context, pieces taken from the album, one gets the impression that the record itself also wants to speak about cultural resistance. What do you think?

“The Great Lightning Bolt” is a quote from a Specchiopaura track on the first album, “Giardino”. When something happens that revolutionizes your way of existing, an act of awareness is needed, a plus of determination. The fact that the album is, let's say, so dense with tracks reflects the desire to dare content that demands commitment from the listener, discouraging a superficial approach to our music and instead calling for a more active one.

Compared to “Discomoneta”, which leaned more strictly toward electronic music, the new album brings out other influences, for example wave, singer-songwriter and so on — the list would be long. Are these different souls tied to as many production teams arising from different combinations among you, or do you gradually converge on each result all together?

Both. Also because the gestation period was long, and we arrived at new conclusions both about how to express ourselves and about our sound style. The fact that a drummer and a bassist-guitarist joined the collective had an impact on the sound. Even on the first album there were elements of, for example, post-rock, but they were more processed; on the new album there are both instruments rendered unrecognizable and more conventional timbres.

The red thread of criticizing the music industry, the “shitty music”, to use your own words, remains

Yes, although by now we're practically coming to terms with it...

Indeed... You made Disco Moneta on your own, and then Bomba came on board. This time, though, you've been followed step by step from the very start. How's it going?

The label people never got too involved in the creative process itself. Their idea was to give us full creative freedom while also providing solid organizational support. Don't get us wrong, it's not that we don't need anything by definition, it's just that there are thirteen of us. Some do the videos, some the mixes, some the masters, some the productions, some sing. The challenge was how to coordinate all these energies.

You presented the video in three different settings, all very interesting: in Naples at Quartiere Intelligente, in Rome at La Staff di Scomodo, and in Milan at Dopo? Space. A club tour has been announced starting from Magazzini Generali in Milan, then moving on to Turin, Bologna, Naples and Rome, and you're part of the lineup for the touring MIAMI Fest planned for spring. What will your live show be like?

It's certainly not easy to bring a collective like ours onto any stage. But we have the ambition to perform the album as completely as possible. It would be great to play the arrangements in their hybrid form between acoustic, electric and electronic, just as they were conceived. Being thirteen on stage means, for us, bringing into the light of day what happens in the studio, or at home in the moments when we're all together. We'd like to convey that same naturalness and fluidity that gives everyone the freedom to contribute by following their impulse. Often, for example, when we play live, all the singers are on stage with their microphones on, and there are spontaneous vocal interjections. The interaction can also extend to the visual side of the show. We're working on it.

Do your tracks come to life mainly at Buco studio, the professional space you run, or in other communal living situations?

Both, although the moments when we live together without following a work schedule are the ones that produce the most interesting content. For this album, for instance, we were lucky enough to be hosted by a friend in Ostuni for a week, and on that occasion we laid down a lot of demos that later became tracks on the album. The rest of the material, too, comes from moments of visceral collective creativity. Buco Studio gives us the chance to record any instrument independently, but the composition of the tracks comes from less structured situations.

Let's talk for a moment about Naples. Do you feel connected to the many traditions of your city, including that of the Neapolitan underground across the decades?

In some way, inevitably, we're its children. The past concerning Naples' underground belongs to us too, both musically and iconographically. Except for Altea, who was born and raised in Puglia, all of us grew up in Naples, either in the historic center or in the surrounding hinterland. It's not so much an influence as the fact that we're an integral part of a world, and vice versa. And let's not forget that Naples is also, more universally, Southern Italy, when we talk about vitality, energy, imagery, and a whole series of elements that might seem banal but are actually essential, bringing people together and representing them. In all this we would place not just the underground, or a certain Neapolitan, Salento, or Southern music scene in general, but more broadly a way of feeling things shaped by the narratives, even contradictory ones, of the South.

So how did you experience the whole surge of interest in Naples over the past few years?

Any kind of reassessment of Naples is a phenomenon that tends to happen quite cyclically. When it comes to the big numbers, the problem is that only certain categories of entrepreneurs benefit from the resulting economic spin-off, and the wealth isn't redistributed across the area. The improvements never become systemic. That's why we don't feel we can talk about a rebirth of Naples, because that's not really how we experience it.

Actually, I wasn't referring to tourism figures, or to the televisual or cinematic imagery, which I'm sure you've been asked about plenty of times. I was talking about music, and in particular about artists closer to your own world who've suddenly reached huge numbers - take the example of Nu Genea, or Liberato himself.

We're actually unlucky enough - or maybe it's something we consider lucky - not to fit the Neapolitan musical canon, in the sense that, aside from our use of dialect, our influences come from wildly different worlds, ranging from Burial to De André, from João Gilberto to Aphex Twin, from Radiohead to Salento folk. Maybe if we had a more strictly Neapolitan sound, we'd be overexposed too, but that's not what we're after. What interests us instead is a kind of Neapolitan identity that breaks with convention, far from easy simplifications and instead attentive to complexity and contradiction.

In "Piccolo atto di sensibilizzazione al libero pensiero" you say that "i nemici si incontrano nel sonno/ hanno un sorriso largo e poca voglia di parlare". Do you feel politically engaged?

We can't stand categories. Given two options, the one that interests us is always the third. We feel a strong need not to belong to pre-packaged boxes, uncritically going along with choices already made by others. A thought is truly free only when it doesn't let itself be swayed even by things that at first glance seem the most morally acceptable. The song's title is a kind of provocation about the hypocrisy of always feeling righteous simply because you belong to a group of thought defined as the sane one, the undoubtedly correct one.

From politics to love. In "19" there's the image of falling asleep “Testa e piedi/ Piedi e testa/ Per contemplare l’anonima sorpresa”, which struck me as a sort of reference to two fetal positions, as if two lovers were being reborn by falling asleep together. What does the chorus actually allude to?

That's a really beautiful interpretation. We started from the description of a physical posture, which of course opens up to metaphorical, abstract meanings that touch on life in a universal way. Whoever's listening can find the meaning, or meanings, that speak to them most directly.

In your lyrics you use a great many images that are far removed from everyday life, or that talk about everyday life in a disorienting, sometimes almost visionary way. Where does this need come from?

From the desire to reach people on a deep level, aiming for shared emotional traits. If your descriptions aren't didactic, but instead trust the instinct to evoke through images, then everything - even the description of a relationship between two people - becomes more powerful and universal. Our lyrics often start from the questions we ask ourselves following the small things that happen to us. But as we write, the questions become increasingly existential, increasingly profound. What interests us about music is its expressive drive and the moment of connection it creates with whoever's listening.

A world this ambitious and multifaceted, where what matters is the overall narrative rather than the single track, has never yet been released in physical format. At least not until now. Will "The Great Lightning Bolt" also come out on record?

Releasing a thirty-track album isn't exactly simple, but our friends at Bomba are true professionals in the field, and within the collective there are people who can handle mastering and artwork... so the idea of a vinyl release could well happen - which at this point would have to be a triple LP, just so we don't miss out on anything...

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