When we look at videos or photos from our childhood we sometimes become mesmerized. A nostalgic smile escapes us as we try to recognize ourselves, to remember how we were. It also happens that you suddenly get a pang in your stomach. Between a video and a photo a question creeps in: what would that boy or girl think of us if she saw us today? Lamante, stage name of Giorgia Pietribiasi, dug into her memories, enclosed them in 11 songs and tried to find an answer by reconstructing her past in her debut album In memory of.
The 11 songs on the album tell the story of her 25 years: from the little girl who fell asleep listening to CCCP, who wrote poems during math class, who listened to her mother read The capital of Marx and who was unable to finish her first concert, that of Massimo Volume, because “I was feeling ill, something was vibrating inside me that I couldn't explain”, to the girl who left the mountains of the Upper Vicenza area and moved to Milan. Lamante rewrites the history of her family and her roots “in memory of” herself. It is no coincidence that the album cover is a photo of her when she was 6 years old, with a sly smile and the red star on her cap.
Lamante's memory changes when she finds her grandfather's diaries, her memories take a new form and lead her to write, to begin the creative process that will lead her to In memory of. She lived with her grandfather until she was 7, immersed in the Venetian fields between “raising potatoes and milking cows”. Growing up, she decided that she wanted to become a loser like her grandfather: «A farmer has few things in life: faith, hope, knowing how to conserve and knowing how to lose. He is part of the relationship with the land, you grow to eat and lose what you had.” For Lamante, learning to lose is a revolution. Losing yourself, getting lost in what is other or what does not belong to you. “Right now I'm losing 11 songs that encompass 25 years of my life.”
It took three years to complete. «I chose from 100 songs that I had written: order of my producer Taketo Gohara. I had six months to write. I was almost going crazy.” Gohara, who has worked with Capossela, Verdena, Negramaro, Afterhours and many others, is almost a musical father for her. «When he became interested in me, I thought it was a joke. She called me while I was walking in the middle of the Venetian countryside. She was in the studio with Andrea Rondini when she accidentally listened to one of my pre-productions made with headphones and Garage Band. She asked who I was and it all started from there.”
If he once started from writing to compose a song, now Lamante starts from a sound. «The entire album was born in my house in Schio. The musicians who play with me are lifelong friends. When we go to the studio we record live, some chords, a draft of the structure of the piece and they follow me.” In the studio they call her “boss” and she likes it: “I must say it's nice to be called that by six men.”
In the album, he tells the story of his family, defending the memory of the female part. «My aunt's death from an overdose in the 1970s was a great wound. She died before I was born, yet I experienced and felt her loss intensely. Maybe because in my family we never talked about it, you know, at the time we were ashamed.” Lamante says that they have been difficult years for Schio, in general for the entire area of the Upper Vicenza area, years of struggle, of heroin and of silence. «All the stories we have inherited have always been told by men, by the classic figure of the master father. The one my aunt ran away from when she was very young. In 1973 she went to Amsterdam because she wanted to get away from her father who did not accept the fact that her daughter was carrying on struggles, even over her body, from not wanting to get married or have children to wanting to smoke joints. Eventually he managed to bring her home, shortly afterwards she died of an overdose. This violence of men, this desire to make history of the women of my family has spread generation after generation up to me. For me this album is very important, because here finally women are speaking.”
In the short video with which he launched the disc there are women gathered in a cemetery. One of them reads a text to a little girl: “Once upon a time there was a woman who sang about her freedom, women all over the world took courage and did the same.” Lamante tells in a fairy-tale way a world divided in half: on one side the women and on the other the men who, frightened by the song of female independence, start a war. «The idea came from a dream I had: I was walking through the fields eating a pomegranate, when some men appeared and started yelling at me. To defend myself I screamed louder.”
In pieces like Don't call me beautiful, Lipstick and Top floor Lamante talks about what being a woman means to her, the relationship with sex, the body and love. Sex is an addiction, the body is part home and part prison. She could eat alive anyone who tries to call her beautiful. «Let me be clear, explaining my being a woman is not the driving force of my music, but I want to tell it».
When she was little Lamante made a list of things she wanted to do by the age of 25: write a book, make a film, enter parliament with a party called Giorgia's Testimoni, publish a record. «Now I'm writing a book, I plan to shoot a short film with Nicolò Bassetto, I've written about twenty songs for my second album. I'm listening The nature of things by Gaia Morelli, I'm liking it a lot and it goes beyond any genre label. For my second album I would like fewer arrangements, more sparse songs. I'm fed up with the usual verse-chorus structure.”
On May 23rd his featuring with Levante will also be released in the new version of Tough like me contained in the new version for the tenth anniversary of the album Instruction Manual. Political career aside, Lamante is ticking off just about every item on that list. Who knows what the little girl on the cover of would think of her In memory of? «Maybe she would be pissed off, maybe surprised. In any case, she no longer exists, I lost her while making this record.”