PeterG: Piero, Paolo, Luca, thank you for taking the time to speak with me today.
Piero: Hi Peter! Thank you for inviting us to your music room!
PeterG: Let’s get right into things but asking what you were listening to during the 1990s, because my listening to your releases to date gave me some ideas.
Piero: Talking about bands of that decade, in random order: Guns’n’Roses, Stone Temple Pilots, Rage Against the Machine, Primus, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Living Colour, Faith No More, Radiohead, Pearl Jam, Extreme, Massive Attack and many, many, many more…
PG : Who were your music-heroes when you were growing up?
Piero: all sort of guitar-heroes, starting from Jimi Hendrix, continuing with Ritchie Blackmore and Jimmi Page and going to YngwieMalmsteen, Steve Vai and Joe Satriani. Of course, it’s worth mentioning some influencing bands like Genesis, Rush, Deep Purple, Led Zeppelin and Metallica just to name a few.
Luca: Tool, PJ Harvey, Ben Harper, Radiohead, Sigur Ros, Faith No More, Massive Attack, Porcupine Tree
Paolo: Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Judas Priest, Queensryche
PG: What was the key influence on those first sessions, and where do you think you were taking your sound for the first record?
Piero: Paolo and I started with some improvisation sessions, and what went out was a sort of modern progressive rock characterized by some 80’s/90’s influence in the global sound. Certainly, we were highly influenced by the Porcupine Tree/Steven Wilson style being that they were, and still are, our main source of inspiration.
PG: Piero, after the initial sessions that created What Senses Blow Away you’ve gone into business as a producer for Peter Hamer Productions. You’ve only done the one VOI record there from the band’s early days. What other productions have come from these rooms since VOI have for to other studios? Was that a conscious decision to separate your two creative outlets, a business decision based on demand, or did you seek out the alternative studios in order to expand the band’s sound?
Piero: I consider What Senses Blow Away as the first experiment of the band, a way to print out some material just to define a starting point. That’s why we did the full production in my own studio, with all the attached limits (less-than-professional recording gear, poor skills in mixing and mastering, and so on).
But, with a bit of amazement, we ended up with a good job and this motivated us to immediately work on the 2nd album, with the intention and awareness of getting better in the production process in order to achieve a more professional final product. This is why we decided to use my studio for recording some parts (bass, guitars and voice) after a gear upgrade, and record the drums in a professional studio. We also decided to leave the mix and mastering process to an external service and concentrate our efforts in the writing and arrangement process.
Talking about my producer job, I started to seriously think about this kind of thing after our 2nd album Oxideyes in 2014. In that time I was regularly writing music, and I found myself writing not only in the “VOI” style, but also in other musical territories. In particular, I wrote a lot of “soundtrack” and “post-rock” music, I had collaborations with other singers and I started to write music for commercials, video games and, in general, for the synchronization market.
So it was more a natural path: while VOI remained a friend’s project, I worked for other projects (as well, professional and non-professional).
In this path, it’s worth to mention a couple of projects I’m proud of: Boundary Exception and Mohai Experiment, which you can find more info on my website.
PG: Do you rely on radio AirPlay for support, or are you totally reliant on the internet growing your brand?
Piero: We’re 90% digital! We made the choice of not wasting money in interstellar promotions or tons of unsold merchandising. Airplay is really important but we concentrated our efforts on promoting our music in the digital platforms like Spotify, Apple Music, Deezer, and so on. We perfectly know that we’ll continue to get unnoticed without a massive marketing campaign and we perfectly cohabit with this kind of consciousness.
We decided to stay away from labels and contracts, not because it’s a bad thing but because was just our choice.
PG: Paolo features on some sources and your Google page cites Michele Santoleri in the mix now. There are some killer drum tracks on these records but neither of the founding members are listed as percussionists. Do you recruit drummers as needed or is that Michele’s role now? When did Michele join up full time?
Paolo: Short answer: we had more drummers than girlfriends! For the 1st album I asked my friend (and former bandmate) Diego to join the recordings and play the drum lines I designed. Then we worked with 2-3 other drummers andsome of them played in live shows with us, but nothing definitive.
For the 2nd album, we decided to program the drums, so there isn’t a real player behind Oxideyes.
After the 2nd album, we hired a friend (Danilo) who played with us in some live events.
In 2015, I had the opportunity to meet Michele Santoleri, a young drummer and percussionist who immediately thrilled me with his playing. I hired him for the recordings of my 1stsoundtracks album Wholes and I was impressed by his incredible drumming (other than being a super nice person and a truly professional guy). I ended up hiring him more and more in other projects as well and, finally, I asked him to play for the VOI’s 3rd album Invisible Light.
Well, I think that the results are talking by themselves!
Michele is not an “official” member however, he lives in another region and he is very busy with a ton of other projects. We hired him for the UK tour and this was our last contact with him as a band.
PG: The existence and disappearance of Italian progwas covered briefly in your “Prog Mag UK” interview that you have displayed on your website. In my review of your first three records I mentioned popular progbands like Kansas, Yes, Rush, Blue Oyster Cult, the Mars Volta, and Butterfly Effect. Is the local prog scene something that exists on the Italian or at least the Euro underground or is there a groundswell happening which will see someone burst onto the world stage soon?
Piero: Prog music was here in the 70’s and is still here in the 21st century. It’s only a matter of finding bands in the music multiverse. So there definitely exists a progscene, in Italy and in Europe as well. It’s just…underground. And this comes from the inside nature of prog music: being a niche with rare exceptions. People are used to modelling their musical tastes following the “most listened” scenario. And this scenario is modelled by big music industry players: today the model is a 3 minutes easy listening song with a simple structure.
Why listen to a 19 minutes song with odd time signature changes maybe in an unusual structure and without the “four on the floor” beat? It’s the same of: why go to see an art exhibition if I can comfortably drink my beer sitting in the garden?
Music is also synonym of education and culture. Arethe people usually trained in the music field? Theanswer is certainly not. So, instead of being able, and used to, listening to a variety of sounds, people end up listening to the same things every day. That’s why progmusic, in these conditions, will always be an underground niche.
Anyway, if you want to discover an amazing progItalian band, go to listen to Kingcrow!
PG: I’ll look them for sure! Now, I heard an interview recently of Sigur Rós, whose native language is obviously not English. They write their work predominantly in Icelandic, which is then translated to English for a wider audience. RAMMSTEIN are the same- their English and German-language songs deliver quite a different message: I think of Amerikaand Du Hast as different songs in each language. Howdo you create your music and lyrics? Is it an evolving process or has it changed over the years?
Piero: We never thought about singing in Italian for several reasons. First of all, it’s way difficult to fit the language’s metrics with the prog time signatures. Furthermore, it “sounds” weird. I mean that the language’s sound and expression does not mix well with the other parts of the song.
At the beginning - and this is how What Sense Blow Away was written - we worked on writing guitars and vocal melodies together and on the fly. Then, in separate sessions, I worked on arranging the music and Paolo worked on writing lyrics - and fitting the already written vocal melodies.
For the other 2 albums we worked almost exclusively in separate sessions. I wrote the raw music, sending the demo to Paolo and Luca for adding their parts. After that, Paolo went back in my studio in order to record the vocal parts,working together in the vocal arrangements.
This last method worked well for us.
PG: When looking for your BandCamp pages, I noticed that you have other work apart from these three records. This includes music on video games! How did this come about?
Piero: As I said before, I started to write “soundtrack” music some years ago. I just started without any ongoing deal, writing and producing this kind of music with the same purpose of writing a song: to be listened by the people. After a while, I started to look at the synchronizations market and I had my first deals, including working for music libraries.
In 2018 I was contacted by an Italian videogames developer that was in search for music fitting the new videogame he was developing. He discovered me on the internet.
He sent me some gameplay videos with the temp music and I wrote something for him. It was a very nice and funny experience!
PG: You’ve been working together for ten years this coming summer. Can we expect a world tour or, at least, a new album?
Piero: After the release of Invisible Light, we dedicated some time for a bit of promotion in the UK (magazines and internet radios) and we organized an UK tour in 2018. After that, we took a break because I was busy with other projects, and I’m the main composer in the VOI’s project. We’ve still some raw material sitting in the hard disk, ready to be “processed”, so it’s “just” matter of time and availability in the agenda. We’re not thinking, at the moment, about another tour. We had the previous experience in the UK and, although it was a really exciting, it was damn time (and money) consuming, and when you don’t have either…well, it goes without saying!
That said, we’ll most probably work on a new albumsoon, so…stay tuned!
PG: Guys, I know you’re really busy and there is so much online about you, but I just wanted to thank you for taking the time out of your schedules for this interview. I am really glad to have been a part of it!
PG (Jacky) Gleeson -- 23 February 2020
