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One Starving Day
 Recently Jonathan Brooks met up with Italy's One Starving Day to speak with them about their past album Broken Wings Lead Arms to the Sun, their development as a band, and future plans.
Before beginning, can you please introduce yourselves and your positions in the band? How does each member personally fit into the sound of One Starving Day?
Pasquale: I am the former member of the band and I play bass, vocals, synths, farfisa, piano, guitar, samples, glockenspiel and harmonium. The other band members are Francesco (drums, synths, piano, glockenspiel), my brother Dario (synths, organs, piano, samples, vocoder and step sequencer), Andrea and Marco are the two guitar players. Everyone comes from different experiences. Francesco played in an indie-rock band, Dario and Marco played together in a doom-metal band, while I played in several hard-core bands, but I think that these influences have disappeared during these years spent together and that they have been sublimated in what OSD is now.
Francesco: We have grown up as persons and this has also influenced our musical approach. OSD music grows with us.
Dario: The interesting thing is that everyone contributes in his own personal way to OSD sound.
Reflect upon remarks about your amazing blend of haunting, ethereal melodies and shocking, sometimes brutal explosions, often accompanied by wrenching vocals. Can you describe your song-writing process?
Francesco: Pasquale is the songwriter, usually he comes in our rehearsal studio when he has already realized some parts for one or some instruments (bass, guitars, piano, cello, sometimes synths). Then we start adding the other different sound layers. Sometime the drums parts are the first things that we add to the skeleton.
Dario: Yes, then from this starting point we move in non predictable ways: sometimes we drown into the sound, sometimes we dominate it. At the end of the composition we always organize every idea in something well defined. We are almost geometric in final structure building.
Pasquale: I think that the most important thing is that the starting point can be whatever, a cello\piano part, a guitar\bass part, a synth\farfisa pattern, or just a sample. Then (after discussing a bit about the whole song) we start playing trying to focus the emotional pattern, and this is the most exciting part as a band because you know from where you are starting but you don’t know where you will arrive. Thus, in the end, more or less every song has a different starting point and an its own developing path, everything is unpredictable as Dario said; you know, for us music is just like chaos……
Francesco: yes, and in the end every song acquires its own life, half of which is a representation of your life and for the remaining half just the 10 minutes song itself……
Where do you pull your creative energy from?
Pasquale: Rain, trees, birds, eyes, dogs, stars, blood, dust, tears, flowers, snow, rivers………
Francesco and I spoke earlier and he acknowledged that he is not a musician and had no interest in marketing and selling CDs; a bold and refreshing statement. What is your general opinion of the “indie” music scene and where do you, as a band, fit into that picture?
Pasquale: For me it has always been very difficult to think about scenes. In my view what really matters is the attitude, and attitude is something that goes beyond the musical genre or scene. There are bands that are similar to us by the aesthetic point of view but I really cannot listen to them because I hate their attitude. While sometimes I feel closer to bands in which I can recognize the same attitude of OSD even if we are completely different by the musical point of view.
Dario: Moreover, no one in OSD is a professional musician. We’re not interested in this side of music. We think about music as something by which we can express ourselves, nothing else.I think that the enormous number of bands is really a good thing, but sometimes I see a lack of quality. But it’s only my impression. We love to make our music in our way, so we are simply close to every band/person who thinks in this way.
Where does the name One Starving Day come from?
Pasquale: It comes from a poetry of Giuseppe Ungaretti “E’ ora famelica”
The biography on your website tells of a 3 year period between the inception of the group as a cohesive force and the release of Broken Wings Lead Arms to The Sun… a period presumably filled with growth and experimentation. Did your sound ever venture down different paths, or is what we hear on this release always been the expression behind One Starving Day?
Dario: In that three years there was a growth through experimentation, in song structuring, song writing and sound building.
Pasquale: As you can imagine there have been many changes, but the mood of our music has always been the same, even if the form has changed a lot during these years. In the beginning the sound was more heavy and was basically built up on a classical rock instrumentation, but after some months we started adding different instrumentation and for the new record we are planning to further expand our sound.
Francesco: More or less we had a precise idea of what we wanted to realize but sometimes it is very difficult to take what is in your mind and put it into music.
Pasquale: We’ve always wanted to realize extreme aspects of the music, but after some years we realized that extreme music does not necessary fit with shouting too loud, what really matters is how and where you do shout. I mean, you can reach a certain intensity also with less loud part or just with a repeated single piano note. So playing with these different part of our music we try to accumulate emotions and then deflate, even if sometimes it is just imploding…………
Dario: …Yes, we spent a lot of time to find “the right sound” and due to the fact we are sound maniacs, it is a still a process in progress. Anyway we’re very satisfied of BWLAttS’s sound; it is the perfect picture of what was OSD’s sound in that period. We all have to thank Davide Lenci for this. He is a very nice person with a lot of knowledge!
One reviewer commented that this is “not a disc for a beautiful, sunny day,” which is understandable given the melancholic atmosphere that is cast over the entire length of the album… But how do you see your music visually? If you were to paint a picture of a grueling, crestfallen song like “Secret Heart”, what would it look like?
Dario: Yes, I agree. Nevertheless my feelings don’t depend on the weather; sometime I feel very sad in sunny days too. This to remark that our perception of what’s outside ourselves (the music also) depends on what’s in ourselves.
Francesco: During the realization of the album we gave great importance to the artwork, in the end I think that the whole -front and back- cover is a good representation of the OSD music contained in BWLAttS.
Dario: I don’t know, maybe ruins and post apocalyptic landscapes could well represent the atmospheres of Secret Heart.
What bands inspire you? What are you currently listening to?
Pasquale: It is difficult to say which are the bands that have really influenced us as a band. But personally I can mention Swans, Joy Division, King Crimson, Neurosis, Current 93, Physics, Tangerine Dream, The Vss, Ash Ra Tempel, Rodan, GYBE!, Bastard.
Currently I am listening to Nine Horses, and other things by Keith Fullerton Whitman, Gospel, Cocorosie, Russian Circle and Metallic Falcons.
Dario: There are some artists that bring the music on brilliant point. I‘ll ever be astonished by the music of Klaus Schulze, Tangerine Dream, Ash Ra Tempel, Popol Vuh, Can, Faust, Agitation Free, Magma, Heldon, Robert Wyatt, Miles Davis, Herbie Hancock, Nick Drake, Area, GSYBE!, Neurosis and too many others to mention here!!
Currently I’m listening to Nine Horses, Delia Gonzales & Gavin Russom, Shora, Radio Massacre International, Triosk and others.
Francesco: I’m currently listening, among the other things, to Metallic Falcons, The Ascent of Everest, Red Sparowes, nmperign / Jason Lescalleet, Polwechsel, Genghis Tron, Birchville Cat Motel, Nadja, Wolf Eyes, Eluvium, Excepter, Strangers Die Every Day, Young Widows, Roncatto Braathen, El Minotaur, Laura.
Have you had the opportunity to play many shows? How would you describe the live experience?
Francesco: Immediately after the release of the Emo Diaries number 7 we played some shows in our local area and some other place in Italy. Those experiences have been very exciting for the band. In those shows we played the songs that are now in BWLAttS. Moreover I thought we played better each time we played. So after these shows we were ready for recording the songs in the studio. We recorded them live to make it as close to a live performance as possible! Now…our plans are to have more live performances throughout the next year trying to arrange some shows for a mini tour in Europe too.
The vocals throughout BWLATTS are overwrought with emotion and sentiment. The lyrics in “Fate Drainer” illustrate your infinite exploration of pain, suffering, and release: [arms raise like wings/to give sense/to motionless air/for a rock, of shouts and hopes/that is heart.] Words like these correlate and flow with your darker sound beautifully. Do your lyrics evolve from personal experience, philosophical journeys, or something between or beyond?
Pasquale: The lyrics come from personal experience sublimated through my sensibility, but they do not refer to some event in particular, never! In the words of BWLAttS there is all my life and how I perceived it until that period. I think they are very personal, but I don’t like too explicit lyrics, maybe this comes also from the authors that I like the most and influenced me during that period.
After an experience that combines exhausting scorches of highs and lows, BWLATTS closes with a 6 minute wordless melodic and tranquil piece (Silver Star Domain) that seems to drift and fade into silence. Is there an emotional reason behind ending such a powerful album this way?
Dario: I don’t know, it seems perfect to close the album; every time the open space lets my imagination continue after its conclusion. The apparent absence of structure and the void created by the sound make the album endless.
Pasquale: Yes, also the name “Silver Star Domain” could give some hints, it is related to the first song “Black Star Aeon”…….
What do you hope for listeners to take with them after experiencing this release?
Dario: The emotional charge. It’s the only real important thing for every artist, whatever is his art form.
What can we expect in the future?
Francesco: We are working on the new tracks that are supposed to be included in our new album. We hope to record them before the end of the year. The new stuff is a bit different from what you can listen to in BWLAttS.
Pasquale: The new album will be based on the relationship between space and time, and the main change concerns the increased cohesion with our vintage electronic machines. However there will be many changes, lets say that we are in a continuous evolution, we will see……
Dario: Surely, who found interesting BWLAttS will be glad of new compositions, although they are quiet different. I think our sound is evolving in a very interesting way: we’re focusing more on certain characteristics of our sound and we’re trying to complete it with the introduction of new elements.
Thank you for taking the time to spend with me and giving thought to the above questions. BWLATTS was an astounding release to me personally and emotionally stunning. I’m anxious to see what lies around the corner for One Starving Day.
Pasquale: It has been a pleasure. We would like to thank you for this interview and for your kind words. It is thanks to people like you that music is alive, the passion for music of people like you makes it go on. Thank you Jonathan.
-Jonathan Brooks
Written By: hostDate Posted: 12/16/2006Number of Views: 1624
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