Earthset

Earthset

An Interview with Earthset

Jammerzine has an exclusive interview with Italian band Earthset. This band, to me, is one of the reasons I created Jammer Direct and Jammerzine. Their music evolves deeper and deeper into the truest form of originality and their career takes them to original places others rarely go.

And in this interview we talk with Luigi Varanese and Ezio Romano, two of the masterminds behind the music, about their upcoming album ‘Bound’, their recent single and video ‘Pills’, and how they got from there to here on their own terms.

‘Bound’ releases on March 8th, 2022 (pre-save links below).

Check out our other features with Earthset HERE.

About Earthset

Luigi Varanese, Costantino Mazzoccoli, Emanuele Orsini and Ezio Romano are Earthset, an alt-rock quartet from Bologna, Italy.

Together since 2012, after their debut in 2015 with the concept album “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness” and the EP “POPISM” two years later, in 2018 they made the soundtrack of “L’Uomo Meccanico”a 1921 Italian-French silent film restored by the Cineteca di Bologna.

A tour was organised as a result of this experience, in collaboration with the Cineteca di Bologna, which led them to play the soundtrack around Italy and abroad.

Some of the highlights of this tour were the presentation of “L’Uomo Meccanico” at the Pesaro Film Festival; the show at Franco Maria Ricci’s Labirinto della Masone; the opening night of the Soundscreen Film Festival of Ravenna 2019, in which the band also had the opportunity to play together with the director Abel Ferrara; the shows in Brescia and Pisa, in collaboration with the local Universities; and, abroad, the closing evening of “Les Rencontres du Cinéma Italien” festival, which hosted soundtracks made by Italian groups such as Massimo Volume, Julie’s Haicut and Giardini di Mirò in previous editions.

Following the show’s success, the band released the soundtrack’s LP, recorded live and published by Dischi Bervisti and Koe Records.

The album was released on January 31, 2020 and was officially presented on the same day with a show in Rome, at the Salle du Cinéma of the Institut Francaise Center Saint Louis, in collaboration with the French Embassy. However, the subsequent tour, scheduled to support the release, was canceled due to the COVID-19 crisis.

Thanks to the experience with “L’Uomo Meccanico”, they produced a new cine-concert for Murnau’s “Nosferatu”, commissioned by the Ravenna Soundscreen Film Festival and presented exclusively at the 2020 edition of the Festival.

In February 2021, however, they recorded “Retour au Ciné” a film of the “L’Uomo Meccanico” cine-concert, shot live at the Teatro Comunale in Bologna and produced by Fonoprint studios, with the contribution of the Emilia-Romagna Region and the collaboration of ATER Foundation.

The film premiered at the Univerciné festival in Nantes and was then broadcast as part of VIRALISSIMA, the online event format of the Emilia-Romagna Region, which brought together the best of the regional production. In the second half of 2021, work on the new album “bound” was completed.

About ‘Bound’

In Earthset’s vision, “Bound” isn’t just an LP, but a full audio-visual-performative work of art. The album is made up of 11 tracks, each with its own video, each song and video connected to the previous and the next both visually and musically, creating a unitary 42-minute-long audio-visual narrative.

The concept that binds the whole project together, songs, images and videos, is a reflection on the value of relationships as the foundation of existence and is revealed in the title itself, “bound”. Coherently, the album works best together in its entirety, as it was envisioned as a whole.

As a matter of fact, while each song perfectly stands as a valid single, it is in its relation with all the other elements that make up the audio-visual project that the experience is justified and reveals a completely different meaning. The focus is not on the single elements but in the relationships between them, as the relationships bear meaning and are justified in themselves.

“The act of making music has its value in the infinite series of interactions that lie within it and acquires further value in the potential interactions that may come from it. It is, after all, an attempt at communicating and connecting with a potential listener or viewer. Therefore the whole album was recorded live in a single take, without breaks or cuts and no edit; it is a key feature of the work and is in line with the mindset Earthset adopted for it. This is documented in a video of the full recording session, which is extra content.”

Bound will be released in March 2022 via Dischi Bervisti/Costello’s.

LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/Earthset
https://www.instagram.com/earthset_
https://open.spotify.com/artist/27FihPbgJOaSdAyq9kgb9t
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCflPJZXoRcY5hGvGrXZbEeQ
https://earthset.bandcamp.com
https://orcd.co/pills
https://open.spotify.com/album/5YYJf90FktsQTRRMZWNInT
https://music.apple.com/it/album/pills-single/1593429471
https://www.deezer.com/it/album/270196352

Earthset - Around The Head (Studio Session)

Earthset – Around The Head (Studio Session)

After a demo EP in 2013 and two years spent playing ’round northern Italy, Earthset has released their debut album “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness”. The album was recorded live in three days at Fonoprint Studios by Enrico Capalbo and produced by Carlo Marrone and Earthset. The first single “So What?” is an energetic, melodic number backed by an infectious beat and a crunchy guitar attack making it one of the most promising tracks to come out of the Italian indie rock scene.

LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/Earthset
https://twitter.com/EarthsetBand
https://earthset.bandcamp.com

Earthset - Flush & In the Pendant (Live Studio Sessions)

Earthset – Flush & In the Pendant (Live Studio Sessions)

After a demo EP in 2013 and two years spent playing ’round northern Italy, Earthset have released their debut album “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness”. The album was recorded live in three days at Fonoprint Studios by Enrico Capalbo and produced by Carlo Marrone and Earthset. The first single “So What?” is an energetic, melodic number backed by an infectious beat and a crunchy guitar attack making it one of the most promising tracks to come out of the Italian indie rock scene.

LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/Earthset
https://twitter.com/EarthsetBand
https://earthset.bandcamp.com

Earthset

Earthset – Around The Head

POPISM is the second EP by Italian band from Bologna known as Earthset. The theme is a compositional “game”, the challenge was producing a “light” and more immediate EP compared to “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness”. The title, POPISM, comes from the search for pop atmospheres and was recently used to describe that trend in music critique which recognizes artistic dignity to Pop music.

The tracks, in their order, represent a path towards increasingly Pop atmospheres. It begins with “Around the Head” a structurally schizophrenic song, the lyrics of which are an interior dialogue on betrayed expectations and passive attitude in the face of difficulties. The song was inspired in part by band members’ personal hardships and partly by an anime’s characters which were used to describe the behavior of the protagonist’s two voices.

“In the Pendant” (a pun on the word Independent) in an outburst, a criticism of the independent environment which emulates and replicates the dynamics of the world of mainstream, deadening and conforming the musical proposal to the search for the fashionable formula.

“Flush” is the song which, after the outburst, turns to more Indie-Pop textures. The lyrics tell of a circumstance where the protagonist discovers and accepts, by breaking her routine, a hidden, and to a certain extent disowned, part of herself. Like two unknown wanderers, the two egos of the protagonist meet and are reconciled in the song’s final explosion, which is followed by a bittersweet coda.

“Icarus’ Flight” concludes the quartet with an overtly pop song whose lyrics are inspired by the mythological episode of Icarus’ flight. The myth originally has a paideutic significance whose purpose is to teach the young not to disobey the fathers, whereas in the song Icarus is the champion of humanity who prefers to outdo himself, at the cost of losing his life rather than accepting the cautious and mediocre existence suggested by Daedalus’ wise advice. The final verse encapsulates the song’s meaning. “Ghosts and Afterthoughts” closes the EP. Ghosts and afterthoughts, which lead back to the psychedelic textures of the band’s more experimental songs, yet built on loops with an electronic and noise feel… signs of future developments? At the moment we’re not quite sure ourselves to be honest. An EP that is a game, a challenge, and a new proposal.

POPISM was self-produced by the band and Carlo Marrone (also producer of “In a State of Altered Unconsciousness” and other artists’ works such as “Petali” and “Malamore” by Gianluca Mondo, as well as multi-instrumentalist with, among others, My Own Parasite, Carlomargot, Murder, currently Soren Larsen). The mix, by Carlo Marrone, coherently with the EP’s theme, has explored more pop atmospheres, maintaining, at the same time, the band’s alternative rock spirit.

The drums were recorded and edited by Michele Postpischl (Ofeliadorme).

The master was done at Fonoprint Studios by Enrico Capalbo (producer of“In a State of Altered Unconsciousness”, sound engineer at Fonoprint Studios for, amongst others, Arto Lindsay, Luca Carboni, Gianmaria Testa, Paolo Fresu, Ofeliadorme, Francesco Guccini, Humberto Gatica, currently multi-instrumentalist with Soren Larsen ).

The cover art represents a sketch of watercolor shadings. Each of the four colors used identifies a member of the band and a song of the EP.

SOURCE: Official Release

LINKS:
https://www.facebook.com/Earthset
https://twitter.com/EarthsetBand
https://earthset.bandcamp.com

Jammerzine’s The Week In #Indie for 2/27/2017

Jammerzine’s The Week In #Indie for 2/27/2017

Exclusive interviews with John Fryer, producer of such acts as Nine Inch Nails, Depeche Mode, Stabbing Westward, and Gravity Kills, and Joel Gion of The Brian Jonestown Massacre. Plus, new music from UK indie band Traveller and Italy’s Earthset as well as our new feature “The Mix Tape” featuring previews of new music that have recently premiered on Jammerzine.

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