Yombe - Electronic vibrations from two soul hearts

The experience with Fitness Forever goes back about four years, I had just turned twenty. Personally, I actually started playing music in Fitness Forever, and I stayed with them for two years on electric guitar and backing vocals, while Alfredo was the keyboardist and general "jack of all trades", occasionally playing guitars and other instruments. We stayed in Fitness Forever until we decided to move on to something else, and the Yombe project was born almost by pure chance. The idea came about in Milan, almost as a game. Alfredo was working as a touring musician for Colapesce, and meanwhile I was working on my album in Italian. Now, in my forma mentis, things in Italian need much longer to come to fruition, so in the meantime Alfredo and I started recording other things. Yombe came out of those sessions, we started putting things out and it quickly became a much more serious thing than we expected. We signed a deal very early on, got in touch with radio stations interested in the project, even some English radio stations reached out to us; in short, it soon became something far more demanding. Now it has completely absorbed us, in every aspect of our lives (laughs).

Looking back at the choice to give up singing in Italian for English, would you make the same choice again, or do you think you might still leave the door open for singing in Italian?

Look, since we've only just started out and I'm also younger than Alfredo, I haven't given up on the idea. Of course, right now I'm proud of the choice we made, but at the same time I'm working as a lyricist (staying anonymous), so I keep myself in shape. I'll definitely release a solo project of my own at some point, I don't know in what form because I try to avoid a careerist mindset: I'm not interested in becoming the most listened-to artist in Italy, I do it for the pleasure of communicating. So I don't know when, whether this year or next, but I won't give that up. Alfredo, on the other hand, has never written in Italian and I don't think he wants to. I don't think he'll ever go back. Besides, Yombe is a project that needs a lot of trust and patience, and despite its successes, like getting onto Spotify UK playlists and appearing on Boiler Room TV, it doesn't cause much of a stir in Italy. Those are important milestones for us, especially since we've never set foot abroad to do promotion. Then again, we're not in a rush for immediate success either. We want to grow, and the sound still needs refining. Still, we realize that our music just isn't really picked up by the Italian radio scene.

How do you explain this lack of feedback from Italian radio? Your genre isn't really that difficult, after all.

Unfortunately, compared to other projects sung in English, we have a darker mood. My voice is quite deep by radio standards, we're really not exactly "safe and cozy" for Italian radio, but we have been played on some English stations. So it's really a matter of editorial choices, and we can say quite calmly that in Italy those choices tend to be very standardized. That said, we're really happy that Massimo Oldani plays us so often, and that Radio 2 supports us.

Staying in the shadows, though, you're managing to preserve a distinct character.

Our hope is that the audience will catch up with us over time. Opening up to different stylistic currents and sounds can only do good for a country that gorges itself on trash culture, without necessarily forcing the project to conform to market standards and ending up saying absolutely nothing meaningful. When you conform too much, it's always your own project that loses out, becoming incapable of communicating anything sensible, unless you're Coldplay, in which case you're the one setting the market logic (laughs).

Talking about influences and inspirations behind "GOOOd", it seems to me that you and Alfredo follow parallel paths, yet also quite distant ones. Am I wrong?

We share a lot of listening in common, but also very different tastes. We often pay attention to different things, ending up complementing each other. I pay a lot of attention to lyrics, so obviously when I say I've listened to Frank Ocean's album, I mean I know the whole record by heart. I dig deep into artists, especially through reading, because I'm a total nerd, I devour books on philosophy and literature. I've delved into certain sounds and languages in particular through the records of Solange; with Kelela I really like some tracks, but her overall approach less so. On the other hand, I loved SZA's latest album, the one dedicated entirely to her mother, for me one of the best albums of 2017, at least in terms of how I relate to things. Alfredo, on the other hand, is more of a student of sound. He goes back in time; right now, for instance, he's been listening a lot to the BadBadNotGood record, super-white jazz guys who nonetheless have absolutely interesting bass lines and rhythms, and are a great source of inspiration precisely because they lack conventional song structure, which helps you avoid being obvious when building your own sound.

So, we definitely follow a lot of black music, but also other things with the warm, magnetic sounds of R&B and soul. Also, having grown up on a steady diet of Notwist, I also draw a lot from that Northern European world, I love how concise they are with lyrical imagery, so much so that people often tell me my writing is very masculine. And I can't deny that, partly because I mostly listen to male artists, and anyway I tend to talk about things in a very dark, oblique way, which is rare in female-voiced R&B, where women mostly talk about interpersonal relationships, about parts of the female body (see Solange and her hair). Not me, I'm much more cerebral, and my lyrics often seem like they were written by a man rather than a woman.

I read about your special connection with Ghemon, who chose you as the opening act for a couple of shows. How did this collaboration come about? Do you think a track made together could happen in the future, given that you share very similar artistic intentions, particularly in always keeping an eye on trends in foreign music?

Ghemon, luckily, chose us himself. I say luckily because we're fans of his, in the sense that within Italian R&B I listen a lot to two artists in particular: one is Neffa (and i Messaggeri della Dopa), and the other is Ghemon. I discovered him starting with "ORCHIdee" and fell in love with his music. He then found us, with no ulterior motive at all. He's a wonderful person, he chose us to share the stage with people doing things he genuinely appreciates. He gave us his stamp of approval and asked us to join him on tour. The parallel you draw is spot on, he's one of the artists with the most international outlook that I know of in the Italian mainstream, just as Neffa was back in the '90s, and he's had the intelligence to express himself in Italian, a language he uses brilliantly. The collaboration came about spontaneously, and it's not out of the question that if he wants to create something with us (or we want to create something with him), we'd definitely work well together.

If in the future you had to choose between investing in the foreign market or the Italian one, which way would you lean?

We don't really have a plan about that, because whenever we tried to think about it we realized it only created tension and bad feelings. The album is really an attempt to exorcise exactly that, an attempt to be good at something: that's the whole point of the record. Good enough to get past the language barrier, good enough to think about going abroad and keep one foot outside Italy, while setting aside your roots. Precisely to avoid chaining ourselves to certain careerist logics, we decided not to overthink it. So, we're open to any scenario in the future. Whether we get appreciated first in Italy or - as is happening now - first abroad, we don't discriminate and we don't have a preference. The most beautiful part of this work is exactly that sharing: being together on stage, communication made not just of words but also of music, creating bonds. As trite as it may sound, music remains a universal language, and that's above all why we do this. For that reason, I confirm that right now we don't have a precise plan, we're open to whatever the future brings.