At the Wired Next Fest Verdena will tell us about their magic
Sign up to participate - free event The Bergamo band is not the classic group framed in today's music industry. Verdenas tend to be a foreign body and move according to their dictates. It all starts from the Henhouse Studio, a former chicken coop used as a studio and rehearsal room in Albino, in the province of Bergamo, where the group creates, writes and plays. If the grunge and alternative rock roots of the early days were more than evident, over time they found the way and the codes to experiment and in Wow, the fifth double album released in 2011, there is perhaps the real change of register and a new compositional plan after the distorted hangover of previous years.
They absorb from the most experimental Italian singer-songwriter, embracing psychedelic and dreamlike moments, discovering themselves skilled weavers of more pop plots. Rockets, harpy, hell and flames is a prime example of this. Wow was the point of no return that raised their writing, freeing them from the too limited grunge band label that up to that moment did not even perfectly define the sound of Verdena, much more multifaceted and varied.
Endkadenz vol.1 and vol. 2, released in 2015, are two albums released in the same year after a few months where the compositional souls are outlined in a marked way, but the 26 tracks are divided by dynamics and sound in a balanced way between the two discs. They are the result of the great creativity the band has when composing; usually there are many songs that are discarded to get to the final lineup, but between Wow and Endkadenz we tend to keep more and throw away less.
Before arriving at I wanted magic, released on September 23, there is something the group had never done before: a soundtrack for the cinema. It is the D’Innocenzo brothers who commissioned it to him for Latin America, a hallucinatory thriller film presented at the Venice Film Festival in 2021. For this new project we start from instrumental material developed by Luca, the drummer, at the time of the recordings of Wow. The directors choose a theme to follow, but the film and the soundtrack almost go hand in hand. The group receives verbal indications and adjectives from Damiano and Fabio D’Innocenzo and based on those they write and play everything in four weeks without seeing even a frame of the film that will see Elio Germano among the protagonists.
Once this little paranthesis has ended, they dive back into the closing of the seventh album which takes the title Volevo magic. As Alberto (voice and guitar of the band) tells us, the pieces that were difficult, or rather, that did not come out immediately in the hoped-for way, were thrown away. The idea of the record was immediacy, but as often happens some songs took time, as in the case of Sino a notte, which did not satisfy them properly in the live performance. Or the same Volevo magic - which gives the album its title - which was totally upset and recorded with completely different intentions, finally becoming a tight and fast punk piece. The first extracted song, however, will be Chaise longue, an unusual and even almost cheerful and disenchanted track.
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The album however, it was born in two different periods and ways: “The reel recorder that broke has certainly changed - says Alberto during our meeting-. So in terms of sound we had to change things in the rehearsal room. On a musical level there are some differences that are not wanted: what came out came out. The first part is perhaps more carefree and ethereal, the second is a bit more nervous ".
Roberta, the bassist continues: "Post lockdown the songs Volevo magic, Crystal ball and those a little faster in terms of rhythm are out. After the lockdown, in those months when we went back to the room, it gave us a push to go faster. The ballads are born earlier, even if Paul and Linda and Pascolare are antecedents ”. It took some time but in the end the souls of Verdena all emerge, both the distorted and primitive one, the more acidic one and finally the - so to speak - pop and intimate one. It is a work that aims more at the essence, going to fish out primal sparks by reworking them with the more mature recent periods and capable of inserting sonic deviations that they handle with a certain skill. The Verdenas are back and the recipe for their magic is unknown, even to them.
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