16 Oct 2019

Julie's Haircut Interviewed by VORREI

Italian online culture magazine 'VORREI' have interviewed Julie's Haircut about their new album & career.

It reads (Rough Translation):

Interview with Julie's Haircut , a piece of history of the Italian independent music scene.

They were trained in Sassuolo in the nineties and at the beginning they were in three - Nicola Caleffi, guitar and voice; Luca Giovanardi, drums and voice; Laura Storchi, bass and vocals - today there are six elements.

Ten discs - of which the last, "In The Silence Electric", published just over a week ago for Rocket Recordings - one different from the other, dates on dates collected between Italy and abroad and a very strong propensity to improvisation, to experimentation and the search for sound, an attitude that over the years has led the band to an evolution of its sonorities originally linked to garage-rock.

For a chat about their music making and what it means to be a band we intercepted Luca, co-founder of the band who in these days celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the debut album's release, is engaged in a tour started in late September in Belgium , France and England, and that this week will bring them before a brief stop in Turin on 18th at Spazio 211 and on Saturday 19th at Monza in Arci Rincewind for All Our Blood.

Twenty years have passed since the release of your first album which was followed by another nine. Which track are you most attached to? Is there one that, in hindsight, you wouldn't have wanted to publish?

It's really impossible to choose just one song. There are so many that I love, others that (fantozzianamente) I esteem, others that I find dated but for which I still feel very affection. I can say that there is not even one that I never wanted to publish. Obviously, if you go back to the first two / three albums I find songs that today I wouldn't even write, but what you have to understand, and that you sometimes missed out on interpreting, is the strong dose of self-irony that some of the early songs contained . Pieces like Too much love, for example, when you hear today they make me smile. But then I think that even then they made me smile, in reality, there was not the least machismo in writing a song of sexual revenge like that: it was a way of saying: “look, we are so unlucky that we can afford to write our Sex Machine and laugh about it ".

This year for you it was a year of double publication, the soundtrack of Josef Von Sternberg's film "Music from the Last Command" and the new album of unreleased "In The Silence Electric". What was the genesis of the two jobs? How have they engaged you differently?

The soundtrack of 'The Last Command' was commissioned by the Cinema Museum and Transiti in 2017, while we were in the middle of the Invocation and Ritual Dance of my Demon Twin tour. It was challenging, but we couldn't miss the opportunity and so we took it. We didn't want to take the chance by doing simple improvisations on the images. We could have done it, we know how to do it, but the opportunity to put a silent film to music was too tempting: we analyzed the film in detail, we looked for themes and references to its structure, we studied how music and images influence each other and we have brought all this into writing the film's musical themes. It has also allowed us to explore unusual musical territories for us, both in terms of sound and style. When it was time to record the album, we did it at the speed of light, also because unlike what normally happens to us, we entered the studio when we already knew the music well and we knew how to do it. So in just two days of study we recorded all 17 pieces of the record. Compared to the live version, which lasts an hour and a half, it is more concise and essential, more focused on listening without images.

For ' In The Silence Electric' instead Nicola and I wrote some pieces in the form of a demo at my house, then we made as usual a couple of days of free studio improvisations together with the band and all this material, then reworked and turned into a studio, we got the nine songs on the record.......


Read the full interview: Vorrei

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