Marta Sui Tubi - Rock in color

Rock in color

by Marco Lo Giudice

On the phone with Giovanni Gulino, the voice of the Sicilian band, who talks to us about “Carne con gli occhi”, current affairs, vinyl and colors

They're one of the most interesting, original and high-quality bands the country has to offer. A flood of shows, from big venues to private houses, from Piazza San Giovanni to secret concerts. In between, four albums and a trademark sound that sets them apart from any comparison - a dangerous game here in Italy.

Marta sui Tubi are currently on tour presenting “Carne con gli occhi“, yet another confirmation of the Sicilian band, armed with an artistic recipe that's by now well-honed and consolidated. On the phone, Giovanni Gulino's voice doesn't sound like the one that screams, whispers and chases notes from the highest to the lowest onstage: it's relaxed and calm, as if hiding a certain excitement for the recently released album. “We put everything we could into it, without setting ourselves any limits or rules. For us music can't have rules, we're not interested and we've never been interested in writing songs for the radio. The point is that essentially we want to have fun: if we can't enjoy ourselves while creating something, we don't even finish the song, we just leave it there”. And part of this pleasure is certainly also down to an undisputed technical mastery, which keeps Marta (along with a few other cases in Italy) far from the misconception that good rock music has to be easy to play. But it's a virtuosity that's never overbearing, always aimed instead at beauty, at emotion: “When I was a kid I remember I always thought of technique as the flag waved by those friends who listened to metal heads: more technique than good songs. I was completely taken with Cccp, who put out educational messages that were anything but technical! That's why I grew up with the fear that technique would damage the ability to play together. And that's why today, with Marta, we make technical virtuosity a distinctive trait, sure, but never an end in itself”.

“Carne con gli occhi”, like the previous records, knows how to play with emotion, technique and irony too. Marta also go looking for a smile, but without ever falling into the ape-like antics of certain goofball bands: “Our songs have this playful, ironic side, we like to communicate irony through our instruments. I think it's a way of remembering that life is also made up of beautiful moments, and that an introspective side has to be matched by a playful, happy one”.

There isn't much to laugh about, though, in “Al guinzaglio”, which instead talks about the duty to react to these dark times of ours. One of the many flashes of current affairs woven into the album: “Right now we're under enormous pressure when it comes to politics, we're bombarded by news that becomes a daily topic of discussion for us. Not always, but sometimes it's obvious that these things slip into the lyrics too: it happened with ‘Al guinzaglio’, the most explicit one, with ‘Camerieri’, which expresses the widespread intolerance towards others and the resulting inability to communicate, and also with ‘Carne con gli occhi’ and ‘Il traditore’, which both talk about the urge to betray and desert a context we no longer recognize ourselves in”. From discussion to song: Marta seem to have kept a very strong rehearsal-room dimension, despite the experience and maturity they've achieved. “There are individual ideas that get developed together, but a lot also comes out of real jam sessions during rehearsals. And between the ideas from our personal archives and the things born together, we always end up with a mountain of outtakes to pick the best ones from to work on. The result is that in the end there isn't a single song written by just one person, from start to finish”.

In “Carne con gli occhi” there's also the valuable studio collaboration of the young and talented Tommaso Colliva, who has already worked with Muse, Afterhours, Calibro 35 and many others. Marta were looking for a uniformity that only Tommaso's experience could give them: “We had a bunch of uneven songs on our hands and the risk was ending up with something that sounded like a compilation. We knew Tommaso well, he was 'part of the family', and calling him in was almost an automatic step. His help was precious in the final writing stage too, in the rehearsal room: he trimmed away a ton of stuff, like a good chef he cut the excess from a recipe we always tend to overload with too many ingredients”.

A happy reality in Italian music, Marta – like many others – still don't have the visibility they deserve, and that they might have had a few years ago, when good music too found room and sold a few more records. "The quality is there today; I say that because I organize a few secret concerts, and I've seen plenty of good stuff: Alessandro Fiori, Dimartino, and then the great Benvegnù, Teatro degli Orrori, the ever-green Afterhours. What's tragically missing is quantity — not as in the number of bands, but as in the chance to actually reach people. There's an attitude of fear: the media have lost their educational role, and there's no interest whatsoever in encouraging anything that might help opinions, intelligence, thought grow. So what happens? People take the ready-made stuff from abroad. But if people actually listened to certain English lyrics that get played on national radio, and if they were translated into Italian, I think people would spit on whoever wrote them. So it's people who need to wake up, who need to use their ears and eyes with some awareness and critical thinking. Today the best-selling magazines are the gossip ones!"

A fundamentally cultural problem, one that spans music and art in general. And it also has consequences for record sales, according to Giovanni: "This frantic pace of everyday life, which strips away all the trimmings we have around us, can't be applied to music the same way. I grew up with physical records, my father gave me a weekly allowance and I'd go buy 45s. And I think physical formats are still essential: being able to enjoy the artwork, the lyrics, the record itself... it's unique! We need to nurture a sense of community, encouraging kids to pay for the music they listen to. These days, incidentally, the whole concept of illegal downloading is pretty relative, since you can now stream music at the same quality as a physical record. The real challenge instead is to keep feeling like record collectors, and artists too need to have the courage to reissue on vinyl, and generally to take the utmost care over the physical product."

Before hanging up, Giovanni satisfies our curiosity about the origins of one of the album's most beautiful and intense tracks, "Cromatica": "Our manager had asked us to write a song about colors, and I thought up this little story about colors coming together. I did it with a virtual palette, the kind you get on a computer, starting to combine the various colors. The lyrics came out of that, just playing around, and they use the metaphor of colors to talk about love, which is light; and it's thanks to that light that colors are able to exist."

A poetic intuition that then embraces the music: ladies and gentlemen, Marta sui Tubi.

The tightrope walkers of Italian indie

by Magda Di Genova

But Giovanni is here. Ah, Giovanni! It's the first time I've ever interviewed someone I already know, and I'm glad it's happening with Marta.

You know, Giovanni, there were two things about this interview that made me a bit embarrassed.

One being that you don't know how to work it? (pointing at my recorder)

Absolutely not: that's a given, and certainties never embarrass me!

No, it's that if I want to play "Dub the TV show", I pick up the phone and call you, if I want to have a devastating night of drinking, I pick up the phone and call Carmelo, but if I want to interview you I have to go through the record label. Don't get me wrong, I'm really glad for you, but it just feels so strange to me!

I'd say: "About time!"

The other thing is that I had very little time to prepare questions, so I'm going to ask you some pretty obvious ones. Since you've been doing interviews all day, you'll suggest a few yourself, won't you?

Alright, I'll give it a try, let's see what comes out. I can't promise you anything.

Anyway, the obvious questions are my favorites.

I've listened to your new album, “ C’è gente che deve dormire ” and, even though it's close to “Muscoli e Dei”, I can really feel all the changes that have happened.

What were they?

Well, the move from Bologna to Milan, first of all…

You think so?

No?

I don't think it really made much of a difference, to be honest. I don't think so… If it did, it was definitely unconscious. Why? You mean there are darker moods?

More than darker moods, there are less carefree themes, or at least they're tackled in a more serious way.

I don't know… These songs came out a bit deeper, a bit more layered, and they demanded a different kind of attention from us compared to the tracks on “Muscoli e Dei”. They came out very instinctively — we didn't spend much time thinking about the arrangements, about Carmelo's hyper-technical guitar work or my super-fast tongue-twisters. We gave more room to melody and harmony, and that stretched things out a bit. Then we gave it a good injection of psychedelia, and what came out was an album different from “Muscoli e Dei”, even if, in my opinion, there are plenty of connecting threads.

Let's say it develops “Muscoli e Dei” from the side of songs like “Vecchi Difetti”, “Stento”, “Post” — those slightly more traditional songs, if you like, with less hysteria. We wanted to make an album different from “Muscoli e Dei”. With this record, you might like it or not, but we're definitely not repeating ourselves: we're trying to explore new territory, in a way.

Do you find it a difficult record?

I think so, yes: it's not an immediate album. It's a record that needs quite a few listens. If you listen to it once, one or two songs might stick in your head; if you listen to it several times, though, you follow the lyrics and you might end up liking it more.

Some songs had also already been tested live. Did that help?

Let's say we played several tracks live even before going to record them, because a) we needed more songs (smiles)

For yourselves or for the audience?

Well, both: when you play a show you can't just play for half an hour, and our first record only lasts half an hour, so you inevitably need more songs. Other songs came together and we didn't wait to record them before playing them live. Four or five tracks on this album we'd already been playing live for quite a while. The other songs, instead, came together bit by bit, during the tour, between one show and the next, in the recording studio, in the rehearsal room, working on them little by little.

It helps to play them live because you get a sense of whether the audience likes them or not, that's for sure. But, you know, the emotion a song can convey live is one thing, and recording it in its final form is another thing entirely. It's completely different there too - even if you know a song you've heard many times live, then hearing it on the record, hearing it in a different way, with different arrangements... The song inevitably changes, also because the songs we played live are different on the record, they have a completely different arrangement.

This was a question I wanted to ask Carmelo: the album includes "Lilly", a song dedicated to the cat belonging to Marco Tagliola, who recorded your album. How much did having a cat walking all over you all night influence the recording?

Look, I don't know about a cat in general: if it had been a puma, a cheetah or a lion, it would definitely have been different. But she, that cat, was very important because she gave us an outlet. Sinking your hands into so much soft, responsive fur... I don't know, it relaxed us psychologically. Then, very often, when we were sleeping and woke up with that cat's nose two centimetres from our face... you know, you'd have these terrible wake-up calls, on a love-hate level. When you find it stuck to your face, you grab it and hurl it against the wall because you really can't stand it. But cats are like that: they're beautiful and they're insolent, they couldn't care less.

Several collaborations on this record. I can imagine how the ones with Paolo Benvegnù and Moltheni came about, but tell me about Bobby Solo!

(stretches)

Wait, question one: did he want a lot of money?

He didn't want anything. Are you kidding? He's a gentleman! He's a real music lover, a connoisseur of quality music, which of course is what we make (joking around).

All joking aside, how did you come to think of him? Bobby Solo isn't a name that, nowadays, just pops into your head with a snap of the fingers.

It's true, there are a lot of guests on the record, but we didn't want to make a compilation of friends coming in to play. Bobby Solo came about because that track ("Via Dante") was sung in a different way from my usual style, with a more studied voice, and I said to myself: "I'm singing like a 60s rocker", you know, a bit Elvis-style, striking poses, "and it would take someone who could do it well, better than I can". From there, as a joke, we thought of Bobby Solo, then Stefano (Clessi, from Eclectic Circus, ed.) pulled Bobby Solo's number out of a hat, I called him and he was more than willing. Right away, immediately.

You must have had to explain to him who you are.

He didn't know us. We told him we're an independent band, that we needed his collaboration, and he immediately suggested we meet. We met up, we played him the track straight from the guitar in a hotel in Verona. He was immediately enthusiastic, we started talking, there was an instant rapport, we got drunk together, he trashed half the Italian music business, but (laughing and speaking directly into the recorder) you'll never know what he said.

In the end he came into the studio and recorded this great cameo and we were very pleased with it.

At first we wanted him to play on the track, but by the time he was available to record, the track was already finished, so he did a kind of cover of our song, which we used as the track's coda.

It was really cool because he's amazing, he's brilliant. Nobody in Italy sings like that: he's got technique, a really distinctive taste.

Let's talk about the video.

We shot the video. It's the video for “Perché non pesi niente”. It's a video I really like, I think it's the best one we've made.

Videos are starting to become an integral part of our artistic journey. We really enjoy trying our hand at this art form, I think it's the most complete one. With a record you only hear the music, the way a book needs to be filled in by your imagination. A video, on the other hand, is already a complete art form: it has a flavour, a taste that's already whole, like pizza.

We really like making videos, and making somewhat unusual ones at that. This video is a performance of ours in the main square of a small town in Sicily (Poggio Reale) that was abandoned in '69, after the terrifying earthquake that hit pretty much our whole area (Marta Sui Tubi are from Marsala, ed.); just think, Poggio Reale is 30 km from my house! It's an abandoned town, with crumbling houses, with the fascist slogans still on the walls: everything's been left exactly as it was back then. There are some beautiful editing effects and a slightly sinister atmosphere comes through: you can almost feel the ghosts hovering around. It was truly moving to be in this little town with completely emptied-out houses, tables and chairs left there for forty years, abandoned in a hurry. Now it's all basically closed off, fenced in. We had the support of the Comune di Poggio Reale Nuovo, who really appreciated this attention we paid to the place, and in some way this video completes the meaning of the song.

There's something magical about it, something truly beautiful. It was moving and touching to be in that place. Just think, that place hasn't been visited or frequented by anyone in forty years...

I imagine you felt a certain awe being there.

Exactly. We were basically the first ones to bring some form of music, some form of life, after forty years.

In fact we had a 1500-watt sound system! (we laugh) I don't think anything like that had happened in that little town since, maybe, the last town band forty years ago.

Directed by Fabio Luongo again? (who already directed their previous videos “Stitichezza Cronica” and the award-winning “Vecchi Difetti”)

Directed by Fabio Luongo again, this partnership continues. We're fully satisfied, we're a team by now: there's the Marta Sui Tubi Audio team and the Marta Sui Tubi Video team, and he's fully part of it too.

I really liked what you were saying earlier, because I've always placed a lot of importance on the title and, above all, on the cover of records.

I already know how you chose the title, but I'll ask you to repeat it anyway, and then I'd also like to ask you about the cover: I find it very closely tied to the title.

Since you already know, you could say it yourself.

I won't let you quiz me on what I already know!

How am I supposed to tell you something you already know and pretend to tell it with enthusiasm as if you didn't know it!

(we're laughing our heads off…)

Come on, but it's your thing! Do I have to explain it myself?!

You say it.

…

Go on, I'll tell you if it's right or wrong.

So, when you moved to Milan… wait… it's not nice to interview me. Hey, I'm the one asking the questions!

Come on, go ahead, don't worry about it. It's fun to swap roles.

When you moved to Milan from Bologna, you couldn't throw all the parties you used to throw in Bologna anymore because people would yell at you: “There are people who need to sleep!”.

People banging on the wall at two in the morning yelling: “There are people who need to sleep!”.

Giovanni, people here need to sleep! Look, in the morning they have to go to work! You can't make all that racket!

I can't make a racket. I know, but how are you supposed to have fun without at least a little racket! Just a little, I'm not asking for much!

Okay (I try to catch my breath from laughing so much), but this title seems a bit provocative too, in the sense that it sounds like an invitation for certain people to relax.

Like everything we do, it has more than one meaning.

When it happens, when you're at home, when you go into hotel rooms after a show, the same thing always happens: sooner or later someone comes knocking: “Come on, are we going to stop this? There are people here who need to sleep. Tomorrow we have to go to work!” People complaining because we're stealing their rightful, well-deserved rest. It happens once, twice, but when it happens dozens of times you realize something's not right, and that you're probably living your life a little too over the top, or, in any case, you should be a bit more respectful towards others, even if that's not always possible because we lead a life that, every now and then, drives us to…

Well, despite everything, if you get back from a show at four in the morning, it's also fair that you should feel free to take a shower, if you want to.

These kinds of things too. But also these pointless late-night parties. Very often they're right, other times they're not.

So, after hearing whoever was clearly there to complain say: “There are people trying to sleep!”, we thought it would make a good title.

We even thanked the neighbor in question.

Have you already given them the CD?

Not yet.

The cover.

The cover ties in perfectly with the title.

Alice (Pedronetti, aka Aliké, ed.) offered to handle all the artwork for the record.

She'd come over to our place, and we spent whole evenings discussing what kind of image to go with, and so on.

The idea was supposed to be a block of flats. At first we thought about taking photos inside the elevator, on the stairs, on the little balcony. They didn't feel right. In the end, one evening as she was leaving and going to get her car, she spotted this intercom panel with all the names typed out in Dymo label tape, the way people used to do it, full of foreign surnames. She photographed it and showed it to us. It was just a rough version, but we loved it right away and asked her to run with it. This idea of the apartment building, of people trying to sleep and of people's dreams... It's a nocturnal record, a dreamlike record, so the apartment-block dimension suits it best. I really like it.

On the other record we hadn't really paid much attention to that side of things: we did it in a hurry, with no experience at all in that area.

Alright, we're almost done. The smartest question you were asked today... Obviously not counting these amazing questions you came up with about the 29th on the way here.

Um... Um... Mmmm... Um...

Good grief, were they all that stupid?

No, wait, there was one interesting one... They asked me this thing... something I didn't even understand... It was too clever!

Okay, so the dumbest one then. Obviously not counting these amazing questions you came up with about the 29th on the way here.

The stupidest one… No, there haven't been any stupid ones.

In general?

There's the usual stuff, like: "Which artist would you like to share the stage with, etc. etc." But who cares! I want to play with Carmelo and Ivan.

Then the ones I like are all dead, so either I die too…

Suggest a question you'd like me to ask you.

Ask me abooout… Ask me about the lyrics of “Una donna e la sua semplicità”.

Well, I don't really like asking artists to explain the words of a song, but, as you well know, with “Una donna e la sua semplicità” it was love at first listen. I'll be very happy to ask you this question, because it means it's not just my impression that you're particularly attached to it.

Absolutely. This song is an incredible source of satisfaction.

There's a song that struck me in particular: “A woman and her simplicity”. Would you like to talk to me about it?

This song is about a man, a wannabe artist who spends his whole day immersed in his artistic pursuits and doesn't realize that, right next to him, there's a person who actually has other expectations besides acting as his spiritual nurse, until he reads this girl's diary while she's away. In this diary she talks about him. So it's him who, in this song, plays a part, speaks, reads and comes to understand certain things: that this woman doesn't always feel like being close to him, listening to him, listening to that song in which he says that "there wouldn't be any stars in the sky that night because God would have saved them for a better night," which is a fairly redundant line, deliberately written to make you understand the kind of nonsense this guy gets caught up in. She, on the other hand, sometimes just wishes she had a dog to take out to pee: a way to take her mind off him and avoid all his nonsense.

Then it tells of this life, this life that is nothing but a fiction. The lyrics keep repeating: "I pretended to…" because, very often, we end up not fully living what we experience every day, but simply imagining or idealizing a form of life, a form of existence that isn't actually real, but is only a projection of our imagination, and we round it all off by surrounding ourselves with situations and people who do nothing but complete this sort of metaphysical puzzle. But sooner or later you have to reckon with real needs, which turn out to be different from what they seem.

From here the conversation takes a slightly more personal turn, but this is just chat between friends…

Ride the wave of great music

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