Valentina Dorme - Sogni di rabbia e amore

Mario, a couple of weeks ago you told me that you get used to mediocrity... I hope that never happens! Do you really believe that?

God, no! I was singing that in "Una Colt," a track on "Capelli Rame." When I recorded that song I was in a different period of my life, a period when I was more resigned to things. Now I'm more determined, and I think what you have to get used to isn't mediocrity so much as beauty.

If between "Capelli Rame" and "Il Coraggio dei Piuma" there was a very linear melodic continuity, both from a strictly musical and a vocal point of view, with "La Carne." there's definitely a bigger opening up, a very significant growth and maturation.

I agree with what you're saying. Maybe there was already a small leap between "Capelli Rame" and "Il Coraggio dei Piuma" too.

With "Capelli Rame" (which is perhaps still the album most loved by our audience) we had to do simple, raw things because of the "setup" and production. "Il Coraggio dei Piuma" had a different kind of "roundness."

It should also be said that, even though the lineups that played on the two records were never the same, there was a certain continuity because Paolo Carraro on guitar and Lucio Gazzola on drums were on both. That syncopated feel, less "pop" than "La Carne.", was also down to that lineup and their input, which was crucial to the songwriting and arrangements.

"La Carne." features a completely different lineup, so the songwriting process was different too. Maybe the people playing with me now have souls that are a bit more pop, rounder, more willing to leave room for melody. Maybe I've changed too over these years, and I've been listening to different music: I've been listening a lot to De André and Cohen, whereas before I listened more to Sonic Youth, Fugazi and hardcore bands. The distorted guitars and the sobbing choruses were also children of those listening habits.

You've anticipated my next question, namely the more pop approach that "La Carne." has. So was it enough to listen to different things and change collaborators for you to have a different approach to your music? Or does it also take a certain awareness?

Maybe I'm just less serious. There's a good part of me and my life inside Valentina Dorme's albums, and the flows, the changes are the result of my life, my periods and my moods. It's not enough to play with different people to make a different record. I think there's a recognizable through-line within our albums, including "La Carne.".

There's no kind of reasoning at all behind the songwriting. From that point of view we're very punk (laughs): there are no heavy superstructures in our songs, at least not in the composition process. I think a good part of the pop side of "La Carne." is down to Fabio De Min [of Non Voglio Che Clara], who did the arrangements, the orchestrations that helped us make the songs less indie. This isn't an indie record, it's a record that wants to go to number one (laughs): our intent, more than other times, was to write a singer-songwriter record that could actually sell. There was no real effort on that front, there were collaborations. Going back to what you said earlier, which I denied: outside input counts for a lot, and Fabio made a very strong contribution to at least five or six tracks on the record. The roundness of the album comes from that too.

Great, then. "La Carne." at number one. Have you already picked the single to push to Radio Deejay, shot the accompanying video with all the bells and whistles and explosions, and booked your appearance on TRL?

No (laughs). We've never had an office acting as our booking agency or a press office. Those are all new things we have now, but they're not pushing us toward TRL: I'm afraid our music will remain, as some people say, niche music. We're not yet like Baustelle — we're a bit sorry about that, but also a bit proud of it. We don't even have a knack for self-promotion, we're lazy, we'd need even more people working on us to really blow up, so I think that's still a very distant reality.

Let's go back to talking about the new sound on "La Carne.". If on previous albums you stayed faithful to a dry sound with voice, guitar, bass, drums, now we also have synths, strings, horns, piano as an integral part of a song.

One of the small changes we made a while back was the experiment of "Il Giorno n. 303" on "Il Coraggio dei Piuma". Actually, we have very little to do with electronic music.

The intention was to enrich the songs, enrich them with a classical touch. Our long-standing friendship with Fabio and the love we have for Non Voglio Che Clara helped us think along those lines. We gave Fabio a really badly recorded CD a couple of weeks before we recorded the album, and he enriched the songs. It was something we wanted. Strings and horns have always been a pet interest of ours, but one we'd never tackled, partly for budget reasons and partly out of laziness. Over these years we've met wonderful people like Fabio, and that worked in our favor.

So you gave them free rein, then?

Yes, pretty much. He and I met up a couple of times, me with the guitar and him with the piano, and I gave him a few pointers about the mood and the atmosphere we wanted to create. There were at least two cases, “Un Nome di Fantasma” and “Giulia Bentley in Estate”, where already in the rehearsal room we realized the crescendos could have a kind of epic, symphonic quality that we just couldn't create ourselves, and still can't when we play live.

I gave Fabio some general pointers, but nothing to do with actual composition, no imposing specific notes or instrumentation. We trusted him and it paid off.

In the studio Fabio showed up with a cellist and a violinist, and we spent the whole day there. He did everything: I just sat there listening, and I was happy about it.

For this record you also worked with someone else who's been quite in vogue lately: Giulio Ragno Favero, who, let's be clear, is not your brother.

He's not even my cousin.

This choice surprised me: Giulio is used to sounds far more violent than those of Valentina Dorme.

Alberto [Scapin, the VD guitarist] used to play in a band, My Popular Demand, that had already recorded an album with Giulio, and he spoke highly of him, said he's a very skilled person. I was skeptical: I know Giulio's work with Teatro degli Orrori and One Dimensional Man, bands I've always loved a lot, but that sound seemed a bit too extreme for Valentina Dorme, who are a “softer” band. At the same time, the idea excited me.

I was happy about it: he's a very skilled engineer, and after the first day we hit it off.

There was a pre-production phase that wasn't about recording the album just to re-record it properly afterwards: there was a real conversation with him. He said he only worked on things he liked, and he liked ours, even though they were recorded terribly, with a single mic in the middle of the rehearsal room. He even grew attached to the record and played on pretty much everything: he made some of the guitar “racket” that we just couldn't pull off, arranged the horns, played keyboards. He turned out to be not so much the guru of Italian noise, but a musician and a person you can easily work with.

It seems to me that this is the first time Valentina Dorme have relied so much on an outside person and “absorbed” them the way it happened with Giulio.

It happened with Max Trisotto, who recorded “Il Coraggio dei Piuma” and still works with us live as sound engineer. In some ways he was the fifth Valentina Dorme. Max got into our mood with maybe even more passion than Giulio did. We're also closer to his sensibility, to his musical tastes, and he's someone who's helped us grow.

Something I noticed in the lyrics is that, finally, there are actual names being used. After so many “you”s, now we have Anna, Giulia, Eleonora, and even Valentina.

They're pseudonyms. The album is populated by fake names (laughs). The album is populated by people, especially one who's mattered a great deal in the last few years of my life. “La Carne.” is a much more referential album than the others, but Anna isn't Anna and Valentina isn't Valentina. Giulia is Giulia, but her surname is a different one.

In “Capelli Rame” there were Alice and Rebecca, but they were characters that stood out far less than the ones presented in “La Carne.”

Yes, there's no point denying it: 9 out of 11 tracks on this record have a real-life protagonist who, besides being my life, is a flesh-and-blood person. Names make the writing more referential, they give it "flesh."

Was giving your characters a name cathartic?

Probably. I absolutely have to tell what is there or what was there. It's a common approach, and then some do it well and some do it badly. Referentiality (what an ugly word!) is essential for me: I tell these stories to distance them from myself, and to tell them to whoever's listening.

Catharsis... It's not that it's passed for me in the meantime (smiles), but it's useful for me to repeat things, to myself and out loud.

Robert Smith said back in the day that he writes love songs because love is an easy subject.

I think some people feel at ease with a certain subject, and a lot of us feel at ease with matters of love. Very often the artist is an unreliable person when it comes to relationships, and finds countless stories to tell that are generally over, so full of episodes to draw on (smiles).

I'd like to write about episodes that aren't mine. So far I've managed to do it, in part, with "Olimpiadi Salesiane," which deals with clerical paedophilia. That could be one of the next challenges: telling other people's lives instead of my own.

Alongside these women and your anger, another great protagonist of "La Carne." is Treviso.

There I don't think I said anything false (smiles): the streets I name are real! They're the settings I describe. I don't know why, but I like naming the places where I live, where I walk. There was a good stretch of my life, now over, when I used to walk around Treviso smoking [Mario, I can assure you, smokes a lot and I know he also sleeps very little, ed.]. It was a very long period, it lasted almost a year, and the route I took was a fixed one, retracing and evoking certain walks I used to take not alone.

And then the street names are beautiful: "Via Santa Caterina già Poste Vecchie" is very musical. It was also a small challenge to fit "Via Podgora" into a song, which sounds awkward, but I feel like on "Benedetto Davvero" it makes its own kind of sense.

You asked Massimiliano Parente to write an introduction for the album.

It was Max's idea [Massimiliano Bredariol, VD's drummer, ed.], who knew about my strong love for Massimiliano Parente as a writer — I'm obsessed with his books and his style, he's one of the discoveries I've made in recent years. Max had floated the idea, and I told him: "But he's someone who's panned more than 400 books!". As it happened, some time later, I read on his Facebook: "I don't write introductions. Not even for money." and I remembered what Max had told me. It was a small challenge. I was terrified: I'd sent something of mine, something I consider precious, beautiful, to a rigorous, sharp-tongued person who could have torn me apart on the spot. In the end it went well.

Actually, I know that when you asked him to write the introduction to "La Carne.", he told you he'd only do it if you dueted with Dolcenera. I have to be honest, for a moment I was terrified you'd actually call Dolcenera to propose a duet!

Massimiliano had invented this completely fake and very, very funny love story with Dolcenera during the Sanremo Festival, where he was a correspondent for the newspaper "Libero." In this story, Massimiliano couldn't understand how Dolcenera could resist his attentions. Basically, he'd used Dolcenera as an example of the poverty of Italian song.

Who would you duet with (purely to please yourself, obviously) among:

someone alive?

…with someone alive… with someone alive… with Virginiana Miller.

Someone dead?

Fabrizio De André (bone dry, didn't even have to think about it). Then again, I'll be the one dying! (laughs)

A fictional character?

Madame Medusa, the epistolary protagonist of Massimiliano Parente's “Contronatura”.

An animal?

I like cats. If I had to pick one in particular, I'd definitely go for the grey cat.

An object?

I really like knick-knacks, even if dust often humiliates them. I like vases. I recently bought one with black and white horizontal stripes, and it's small and squat. Rather than duet with it, I'd just put it next to me when I write songs.

This record pays a double tribute to Marco Ferreri: the title and an entire song dedicated to him.

Marco Ferreri, like Parente, is a real passion of mine. He's perhaps the Italian director I enjoy the most, where by “enjoy” I mean he makes you think, he outrages you, he makes you smile, he makes you angry. He's perhaps the most complete author I know in Italian cinema. “Dillinger is dead” has always been a little obsession of mine.

“La Carne” isn't a masterpiece, but I liked the idea of the woman's transformation into the Eucharist. An absolute veneration that maybe is present in my records too. On one hand I liked the physicality (in “La Carne” Castellitto eats Dellera), and I liked his roughness: Ferreri was an imprecise director, he didn't obsess over the framing, he told stories in “jolts,” and I really like that method.

Yet the title of your record is very precise: it's “La Carne.”, with a full stop at the end. Why the full stop?

I liked it aesthetically, and besides, it's definitive. I don't like the idea of telling stories through metaphors, even though I realize, singing my songs again, that I use them too.

This is what's on the record: the flesh. Full stop.

So it wasn't out of fear of receiving some claim from Ferreri's heirs, and adding the full stop was your way of covering yourselves in some way?

Actually, I did think about that too. Do you think I could get in trouble?

I'd like to think not.

Someone might say that Valentina Dorme, being a fairly unknown little band, want to lean on a famous title to get more visibility. I don't really think that's the case.

No, especially since you titled it “La Carne.” and not “Dillinger È Morto”, it's not a title that's too easy to trace back.

Well, let's hope for the best, then!

Another thing that struck me about this record is the two bullets with blood on the cover. On the two previous records there was a woman.

When we had to choose the cover, we immediately said to each other: “No women. Enough. Enough with these indie bands putting women on their covers. We've already got a woman's name in our name and in our identity.” We realized we had absolutely no ideas. We turned to several people and asked them to come up with cover art after listening to our songs. Then, while browsing around on Flickr, I came across this guy, Luca Rossato. At first I was struck by the sunflower photograph that's on the back cover, and then by this composition he'd dedicated to unsolved Italian crimes. The original photograph also had a ruler next to the drops of blood and the shell casings; that was the full composition. It was a composition that really struck a chord with us. We loved the colors, the reflected light and the windows mirrored in the drops of fake blood. It gave us the idea of a kind of good violence, and I think “La Carne.” has something of that in it, this sort of violence, of revenge, of murder.

Your live appearances have always been very few and far between. Will it be the same this time around?

We kept the promise we made to ourselves months ago, which was to get the record out by June. Maybe it's not the best timing, a lot of people advised us against it. In truth, we were saturated with this record, and once the recordings were done, we wanted to put it out. By doing that we basically gave up our summer. Now I'm hoping that with Promorama [their new booking agency] there'll be plenty of dates from October onwards.

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