Blue Willa - An art-rock projection

We've said it many times, and who knows how many more we'll find ourselves repeating it: Tuscany is the largest open-air stage for bands, projects and talents in this early stretch of the third millennium of Italian music. The reasons for this pre-eminence can be manifold: from the relationship between bands, venues, labels and agencies, which is far tighter here than elsewhere, to the sheer number of new projects, since in these parts musicians really do build networks, help each other out, mix their respective elements and qualities, and what comes out of it is very often above average.

Well, if we had to pick just one name, a single fragment to represent the multifaceted sonic cauldron that embraces ever-dynamic Florence as much as the most remote provinces – from Pisa to Livorno, all the way to the Montepulciano of Baustelle – we'd go straight away, eyes closed, for Blue Willa: a band that has made experimentation and crossover (of genres, of language, of expression) its guiding dogma.

The story of Blue Willa begins in September 2004 in Prato, where singer Serena Altavilla, guitarist Mirko Maddaleno, drummer Graziano Ridolfo and bassist Duccio Burberi start rehearsing together under the name Baby Blue, in homage to Bob Dylan and his "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue". As soon as they stick their noses outside, they're already singled out as new talents of the Tuscan scene and beyond: they take part in Mi Ami and perform as openers at the Heineken Jammin Festival, but the first real big opportunity is the 2006 edition of "Arezzo Wave", where the foursome run riot with their first original songs, winning the "best band" award of the event.

It's again thanks to the support of the Fondazione Arezzo Wave that, shortly after, Baby Blue holed up in the Bunkerhaus Recording Studio in Florence where, assisted by Jacopo Prete and Riccardo Romoli, and produced by Paolo Benvegnù, they record live their debut EP, simply titled "Baby Blue". The six songs it contains somehow highlight the extroverted, dissonant-in-its-own-way character of the Prato quartet, already busy warping blues, folk and related genres.

"Ice Cream", beyond the pun with "I scream" – the pronunciation is identical – reveals a very particular taste for pronounced theatricality that would soon become one of the band's distinctive traits, while the song follows the moods of a lopsided blues that explodes noisily in the choruses. "River" builds up layer by layer, starting from Maddaleno's guitar and Altavilla's voice before gradually adding the other instruments into a dust cloud with a psychedelic aftertaste. The odd nursery-rhyme of "Alligator" traces new paths between pop and noise, while "Herzog" (cinematic references will be a constant throughout the Baby Blue/Blue Willa output) fragments the blues into syncopated rhythms before spilling into Sonic Youth-school noise. There isn't a single song that goes "straight": "So Much" lives on singer-songwriter moments – Serena Altavilla's supple voice is already stunning – and rock accelerations, while "Hot Hand" is a lascivious blues that launches into dizzying art-punk spirals, planting the seeds for what's to come.

The release of the EP is followed by a great many dates across Italy. The Baby Blue formula is, however, already ready to be exported abroad, and the first such opportunity comes in March 2007, when the Prato band are called to play at the European "Bilbo-Rock" contest in Bilbao. The following summer brings a second call to Arezzo, this time for the first edition of Arezzo Wave. They often find themselves sharing the stage with artists of international standing: Micah P. Hinson, Carla Bozulich, Chris Field, our own Paolo Benvegnù, Beatrice Antolini, Skiantos, Jennifer Gentle.

2008 is, above all, the year Baby Blue return to the studio (the StudioLab Recording in Cascina) together with Benvegnù to record their debut LP Come!, which would be released in the spring of the following year under the protective wing of A Buzz Supreme. The thirteen songs are "written by Mirko Maddaleno, inspired by Serena Altavilla and arranged by Baby Blue". The result is – in their own words – "a heterogeneous firework display". Opener "Suga" is another signal of love toward that "provincial America" that the four young Tuscans would keep nurturing in music and beyond, as we'll see. As for the song itself, it's a breezy folk-blues that gives way to the measured, pseudo-country melodies of "Far From Home".

A new version of "River" follows and, above all, the alt-rock of "Miss", amid distortion, dissonance and sudden digressions. "All You've Known" is one of the album's little gems, a sort of circular nursery rhyme that, after a sweeping crescendo, spills into a stunning garage-pop coda. "Rita" resurfaces to once again showcase Altavilla's vocal prowess, "Took Me Long" stays within blues atmospheres but unveils a novel and successful double falsetto. "Silently" takes on pulp hues, while "Eileen" and "Mess" are yet more forays into an imaginary world bounded by minimal blues and theatrical accents.

And while "Under Your Foot" goes back to balancing the initial intimacy with a final climax, "Old Story" sounds like country (albeit still in the Baby Blue manner) coming out of a gramophone in the next room, were it not for that wall of distortion which, halfway through the song, seems to want to mark the border between dream and reality. Closing the set is "About It", a crepuscular track in which Maddaleno is the absolute protagonist on voice and acoustic guitar while Altavilla adds backing vocals.

Come! further broadens the acclaim surrounding the Baby Blue name, with the rest taken care of by dates all around the country, the real added value of a band whose shows are not mere concerts but theatrical performances in which movement follows the music and the audience is drawn in and pushed away, engaged and then left alone.

At the dawn of 2010, the time is ripe for Baby Blue to join the roster of Bologna's La Famosa Etichetta Trovarobato, which had already been handling the Prato quartet's booking for a few years. The new partnership heralds the release of a new album, out in September 2010 under the title We Don't Know. Having bid farewell to Paolo Benvegnù, in the producer's chair this time – the recording studio is now trydog in Agliana, Pistoia – is Alessio Pepi of Dilation.

At the time of its release, We Don't Know represents the culmination of Baby Blue's (albeit brief) journey so far, the moment when apprenticeship turns into genuine awareness and full maturity. The four are by now total masters of their own peculiar way of making music, which they pour into ten brand-new songs endowed with fresh weight and further depth.

Baby Blue's sound is once again minimal blues, out-of-tune folk, moody singer-songwriter fare. And perhaps much more besides. "Don't Ask Me Why" opens with the intertwining voices of Altavilla and Maddaleno and ends with a sort of tribute – unconscious? – to Barrett's Jugband Blues, even down to the lyrical metre: "And the sky is too high the earth too tight the sea's not dry don't ask me why". "Oh Marie" is the first style exercise for Altavilla's voice, here full and warm, elsewhere, on the rocking "Shut Up" and "Earthquake", raw and paranoid. It's "Earthquake" itself, the first single taken from the album, that becomes the record's signature track with its irresistible languor straddling garage guitars and an art-rock aftertaste.

"I Don't Know" shows the project's more refined side, "Hey Baby Hey" its more intimate one. "Stay A While" packs crooked nursery rhymes and belligerent crescendos into its three minutes. The following "All Right" stands as a kind of manifesto for Baby Blue-style unconventionality: a collection of genres, moods and sounds that follow one another in a brief parade of moments. "Dawn" and "Porto Palo" close the album amid overlapping dialogues and non-sense lyrics. After all, incommunicability is, paradoxically, the true hallmark of these times of media overexposure, and Baby Blue, as artists, do nothing but translate into music what they see and breathe.

A point of arrival, and at the same time a new turn in the quartet's path, We Don't Know earns lavish praise from the specialist press, while the Prato band — who shortly after the album's release bid farewell to Burberi, permanently replaced on bass by Lorenzo Maffucci — export their surreal little theatre beyond national borders and to every corner of Italy.

The run-up to what would become the third album is littered with twists and changes. While the four take part in a couple of tribute compilations (covering Syd Barrett's "Dark Globe" and Codeine's "Castle" for Tuscan label White Birch Records), the old name Baby Blue disappears, replaced by the more personal Blue Willa: "We changed our name to be able to carry on the story of Baby Blue and give it continuity; the time had come for our creature to grow, and like every rite of passage it had to be accepted and savoured," says Altavilla in the interview given to OndaRock. And Maffucci adds: "Willa is a female name (maybe it's a mangled version of Willow?) that has a touch of archaic, rural, river-bound America about it. Clearly it's an America we can only know from the margins, and it's what stuck in our hands after watching, rewatching and mulling over the film 'The Night of the Hunter' — in the end, a collection of images that, surprisingly, we found resonated in a striking way with the settings that were gradually taking shape. The decision behind this partial unmasking, this new half-identity, came when the album's recordings were almost finished, when it had become clear just how much of a 'genuinely new undertaking' the new songs, in their new forms, represented for us."

There's still cinema, America with its musical traditions, the past and the near future, which takes on elements with no precise meaning, yet which still sound damn good — just like Baby Blue and Blue Willa.

Blue Willa comes out in January 2013, again on the Trovarobato label. If anything, with this new work the Prato band manage once more to surpass themselves and their own limits, delivering a complete and complex album and bringing to life eleven songs in which every element encountered before grows thicker and richer. The term art-rock here is not just a convenient label for the writer, but in a sense a necessary one: Willa's vision is not purely musical but artistic through and through, letting itself be shaped by cinematic imagery and once again carried along by a theatricality that echoes through tones and gestures alike, both live and on record. At the helm is a figure who is nothing short of exceptional, Carla Bozulich herself, "bewitched" by the Tuscan project to the point of becoming its artistic producer. Buoyed by her experience, the four push themselves to further depths, where Altavilla moves comfortably between sublime passages and punk roughness, Maddaleno and Maffucci grind the material down and rebuild it from scratch, and Ridolfo simply embroiders with drumming poised between jazz and hardcore.

The hushed epic quality of "Eyes Attention" opens the album on tiptoe, Serena Altavilla's voice ghostly, the accordion and guitars cradling an invisible procession. After such an accommodating overture, the noise clamour of "Fishes" jars, a lopsided cabaret that dissolves and then reforms into its pounding chorus. As if it were, this time truly, an offshoot, out of the chaos rises the noir march of "Tambourine", almost the musical transfiguration of a spectral procession by Francisco Goya. "Moquette" is an (unwitting?) homage to the Fiery Furnaces, "Vent" a slow, stubborn crescendo with neither destination nor sense ("without any illusion, no because, no why"). Nothing like yet another jolting wake-up call comes with the frenzied tribal punk of "Good Glue".

The sketched-out blues of "Rabbits" winks at the previous album, Birds gives vent to a hallucinated musical schizophrenia. "Moan" picks up the thread of chaos and drowns it in tons of distortion, "Cruel Chain" sweeps away the din and effectively brings down the curtain by returning to its origins, to that strange blend of minimal blues, detuned folk and ever-present, never self-repeating, moody songwriting.

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