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We’re super-excited to be speaking today with acclaimed music artist Michele Ducci; greetings and salutations, Michele! Jumping right into the Q&A mosh-pit, how would you describe your deft and absolutely unforgettable musical stylings to all of the new fans out there checking out your music? We hear some sweet refrains of R&B, electronic and pop/rock coming through loud and clear, but would you define yourself as an artist of those particular genres?
Hello everyone and thank you! I have often wondered what my musical genre was and in particular what is the genre of that strange thing that is music. I listen to music of any kind and find myself in all the genres rightly mentioned in your question. In this work in particular I would say that the genre – as it is said in painting – is landscape. Basically, my strongest obsession is the musical landscape. Every time I write – no matter what genre it is – it’s about probing the threshold; the transition from A to B which is what I call a “quasi” landscape, rather than a framed landscape. Something that passes through poles A and B without ever resolving in them.
Those who are excited by a music have a particular way of listening, which consists of making associations: a sound that refers to a landscape or a color, a face. At a more subtle level, however, it is no longer the sound that recalls a landscape, but – as Deleuze wrote about the music of Liszt – it is the music itself that develops the landscape that has inside such ambiguity that it’s quite impossible to know if it is the sound that refers to an associated landscape or if, on the contrary, a landscape is so internalized in the sound that it does not exist outside of it. I think this genre has something to do with poetry.
Major congratulations on the release of your beautiful new single
‘River’! Starting at the tip-top, can you talk about what inspired you to record this intimate and mesmerizing gem of a ditty? Has this been something percolating since your M+A and Santii days?
Thank you! Yes, ‘River’ comes from a very confusing period in my musical life where it seemed to me that the compass of what guided us – which is music – was being lost. I was in New York to meet people from the music business, and I felt like I was scattered on the ground, encircled by millions of meaningless words. I remember that observing the Hudson River, having in my heart the pressures of the musical career which had nothing to do with music, I felt an immense brotherhood with the moving waves of the river, a sort of consanguinity. I was very heartened by that impression so strong and vivid, so much that it came to find me years later in the guise of this song called ‘River’.
Hot on the heels of the March 14 release of the new single, your debut solo album – entitled ‘SIVE’ – is scheduled to premiere on June 7; kudos and major accolades!
What’s the VH1-Behind the Music origin story on one of the very best LP’s of 2024?
Until a few years ago I thought I’d finished with music, so it fills me with joy what you say! Behind this record there is a lot of desert and doubts about my passage on this planet. I’ve had some really terrible times. A glow was from the study sessions I did with a great Italian philosopher and friend, Rocco Ronchi. We found ourselves in the countryside studying‘Possest’ by the philosopher Nicola Cusano. In the course of these studies, we came across English romantic poetry and I remember that it was from Wordsworth’s poem ‘The Solitary Reaper’ that began to daze me the idea of the album ‘SIVE’. ’SIVE’ is a Latin word that comes from a phrase by the philosopher Spinoza: ‘Deus Sive Natura’ (‘God or Nature’). This word imposed itself on me immediately as the title of the album. I was not so interested in either God or Nature, but that sudden wandering, that transition, that becoming landscape, signalled by the term ‘sive’ which means ‘that is,’ almost ‘namely’. It’s a bit like when in a watercolour or looking at clouds or the stain on a wall, we notice a face and say ‘Here it is’! ‘Here it is again.’!” It is like the passages in music, from a verse to a refrain etc.
What made the album opening track ‘River’ the perfect choice to see release as a single from the new LP? Do you feel that it tonally represents the sound and verve of the album?
‘River’ is a bit like the tip of the album’s iceberg and coming from a very complicated time in my life I thought it was the best choice to start this solo path.
In your opinion, what differentiates River from the Distinguished Competition on the
2024 music scene?
I don’t know if there is anything that distinguishes ‘River’ from the rest of a sort of music scene, apart from the obvious fact that everyone is different because the field of forces at play is their own life with their particular nuances. The only thing I’m sure of is that I forced myself to record it in the most naked and raw way possible, trying to keep the songs in their nascent state, without editing and without all the things now habitual to making music today. I played and sang together from start to finish and the entire record was recorded in less than ten days, basically one/two songs per day.
Who was your producer on both the new single and the upcoming ‘SIVE’ LP and what was the collaboration like between artist and producer in the studio?
I recorded ‘SIVE’ here in Italy, with the help of the sound engineer Franco Naddei at L’Amor Mio Non Muore Studios. A very small studio but where everything is recorded exclusively in analogue. More than collaboration, it is about sharing something that is incommunicable. It’s a very strange and nice feeling to share the recording of a song, which is an intangible entity: a song cannot sit itself at a table, or it is impossible to kiss a song, despite it flows in the space like a character jumping out of a book. Recording a song is sharing an incorporeal that results from the bodies and that differs from what it results from. Always very weird and fun. The most beautiful thing is that in the studio we have imposed ourselves to eliminate any ambition or mania for hyper production: we recorded everything together, without stop, cut… from start to finish. Direct shot piano and voice. The piano was taken up with a Neumann U87 for the top part and with two shoeps in the bottom part. The Neumann was shot inside a pedal Space Echo that ended up inside a Lombardi LC8 valve amp to take both a sound made of the piano and the voice indents made and passed into the amp… I really wanted that the duration of each song had to be exactly what happened during the recording, without millions of over-encisions and montages. In the studio a lot of musicians often tend to record, for example, millions of voices to make a single main voice and over time I realized that the song loses a lot, the voice becomes monotonous and loses vitality… You can’t hear your breath anymore.
The ‘River’ single and ‘SIVE’ LP are being released courtesy of Monotreme Records. What makes Monotreme the perfect home for you and your music?
The real, genuine and delicate passion for music and a clear taste for things that are hard to find. It is very rare to find labels today that still respond to the motto “magis amica musica” and I am honored to work with Kim Harrison-Lavoie and Monotrome. She is one of the people I have found myself best at working with in my entire musical life… More unique than rare in times like today’s so bizarre for music. It is truly a home where you can continue to make music – not other strange things that have nothing to do with music at all – serenely and with great joy.
Who inspires you musically?
Life
In the wake of the release of all of this incredible new music, can fans look forward to catching you on the touring/performing circuit in the coming weeks and months?
Yes!!! I’m preparing the live show right these days. After years of hectic tours and considering that I am a domestic cat who really likes calm, I still have to understand how to proceed but I am preparing a mini tour for September, in places chosen ad hoc, very intimate, very passionate. A sort of “notturno”. The presentation of the album instead will be on June 21 – summer solstice – at the performing arts warehouse (Magazzino delle arti sceniche) in Bologna. The preparation is going very well and I am very happy.
When working on new material, what does your creative process generally tend to look like? Is there rhyme and reason to the creative madness?
At first, and it’s maybe too generic, it looks like the immanent creativity that is matter. It’s a bit like surfing or skiing. I never impose a record on myself, I never decide to write a song. I just know that at certain times I sit at the piano or find myself with a guitar, even without all the strings, and suddenly something happens improvising. Sometimes nothing comes, other times it does. It’s like a small possession and a little exorcism substantially. More specifically I would say that my creative process works like an epistolary. The philosopher Foucault said that the traces of madness in literature and in general would be lost. I don’t think so, just look at how an epistolary – emails – works – to understand ‘who are we/how many are we?’: there are dates, problems, laughter, socks of nylons, issues concerning things to do, other people or things to reach. My creative process is very similar to epistolary, yes! I like it put on this way… It works as an epistolary, with “Objects” and “Subjects” and the vital instance that creates them: a matter of love, work, health, anger, with all their residuals, each different from the other but within a unit of the multiplicity.
At the end of the day, what do you hope listeners walk away with after giving many-a-spin to your incredible new single ‘River’ and the upcoming LP ‘SIVE’?
I hope people can walk away from fear. I believe that fear is generated by the idea that the possible precedes the real, while the possible only comes after the real. What a song does is precisely exorcise the ghosts of the possible: a song is nothing more than what it can be; a song is the reality of its effects which precedes all possibilities that are only imaginable. The world is full of these typical situations: “If I had done this I could have done that…” is a heap of ‘if… then’. I believe that music is like a plant that does nothing but what it can: being a plant, for example, and climbing. Embracing the real is providing that soul supplement to the universe and it is only through this embrace that you can think of ending it with the insanity of war. It’s hugging that impossible but fatal shadow that retreats where it stretches, marking, as Henry De Régnier wrote – another poet to whom I am very fond and who inspired ‘Hic’, the last song of ‘SIVE’ – “the course of time and the divine season where the dawn is all day clear and the night all day long.” I think it’s about learning how to be finally Copernicans!”
