On March 19, 2023, the Mirò Gardens will take the stage at the Kessel club in Cavriago, the same place where it all began, more than twenty years ago, with another name (Calamita). There they had taken their first steps. It's just the first coincidence. The second coincidence is that in the audience there is Markus Mathis, who has been recording their concerts for years with a pair of ambient microphones and a line from the mixer. Nobody knows, but that will be the Emilian band's last concert. The recording ends up in a drawer waiting for the right moment. A moment that will arrive on Friday with the release of Almost home: 70 minutes live spanning twenty years of catalogue, recorded in the exact place where it all began.
This “pause”, the band is keen to let people know that it is not a farewell but a goodbye, is the reason for a chat with Corrado Nuccini and Jukka Reverberi about the history of the band. Because through the events of a group of people from Cavriago – a small town on the outskirts of Reggio Emilia famous for being the place where Orietta Berti was born and where a bust of Lenin stands victorious – it is possible to retrace a good part of the history of Italian indie rock. At least, of that historical season of indies that looked abroad, they wanted to be contaminated with the influences that came from outside to bring our sensitivity across the border, thus trying to speak a language and experience an international attitude with the awareness that the important part of the experience was not so much the arrival, but the journey.
For once I'm not looking for a flashy question but I ask, very simply, to start from the beginning. How the band was formed. And they confirm to me that it all started as one could imagine. The old fashioned way. Corrado Nuccini, still a student of Literature and Philosophy in Bologna, set up a first group sketch with Giuseppe Camuncoli, now an internationally renowned cartoonist, then a commuting companion on the Reggio-Bologna train. «We wanted to give ourselves a tone», says Corrado. «The group is a kind of socializing device: you enter with other people who have a vision similar to yours, and inside you bring not only the things that make you feel good, but also the fragilities, the things that in a small town like Cavriago would otherwise have no place to stay».
Because the province the two talk about, and here they both want me to correct the cliché of the desolate village, was not a province of desperation (we are having this conversation a few days after the exploit at the Davids by Donatello de The cities of the plain). «It was the province of opportunities», says Jukka: «Cavriago had a municipal sound library where as children you could listen to cassettes and borrow CDs, a newspaper library where you read Noise, Blow Up, Buscaderoand a municipal cultural officer, a certain Paolo, who bought Sonic Youth and Rage Against the Machine records for the public collection. At the Unity celebrations it happened to see international names pass by. I saw Sonic Youth there in 1993, the same year as Bad Religion, then Blonde Redhead. I have always felt that influence, even indirect.” And in the background, Corrado says, there was a broader generational factor: the birth of the European Community, then the euro. «Maybe it seems like a secondary thing and now we take it for granted, but for our generation it wasn't: the idea that with the same money you could drink a beer in Cavriago as in Berlin led us to look outside, towards the idea of an international group, far from the world of radio and Sanremo which really didn't interest us».
Photo: Jukka Reverberi
Jukka, on his side, comes from a different history: hardcore, homemade fanzines, the desire to build an identity through music rather than through technique. «The influences were not only musical but also of attitude. For example, I remember falling in love with a photo in which Thurston Moore wears a t-shirt with the words “DC Hardcore Rules” which was one of the most beautiful things I've ever seen, it influenced me more than any record.” The real leap, however, came with a concert in honor of a youth twinning between his area and a German city. They call the Giardini di Mirò of the old lineup – when they still played indie rock in Italian marked by influences like Massimo Volume and Marlene Kuntz – but the designated guitarist backs out at the last minute. Jukka is recruited as a “noise” guitarist without even knowing what to play. «My first concert with an audience I did in Germany. And there I understood that you can really go and play, that you can sing in Italian and people can appreciate it anyway. That concert gave the group the chance to be there.”
The instrumental turning point comes shortly after, and it arrives almost by chance. Singing in Italian, they say, meant remaining confined within national borders. One day Jukka puts on a Tortoise album, discovered who knows how (those were the years without the internet, they remember laughing, “you could say anything about America and they still believed you”), and the idea takes shape. You can make music without a voice, even without being technically faultless. The first cover that the band recorded, for a local competition called Terremoto Rock (what a 90s name!), is a version of Mildred Pierce by Sonic Youth. From then on it's all instrumental, at least for a while.
The leap abroad also involves an almost punk gesture. Jukka wants to buy a record from a small Californian label, Zum, via email. «Do you remember when they used to put money inside CDs? I did it but instead of a CD-R I hid them inside a copy of ours Iceberg EP. When I received the album there was also a letter in which they told us: “If you do this stuff, we'll publish it for you”». The band's first recording chapter was therefore released both in Italy – with GammaPop – and in the United States. Some time later, thanks to a new trip to Germany, contact was born with the label that would become their second home, 2nd Rec.
It is in this climate that the meeting with Homesleep comes, the label founded in Bologna by Matteo Agostinelli, frontman of Yuppie Flu, who passed away last February at the age of 48. «At the time our scene had a strong identity», says Corrado. «Four or five records a year were released which are still good today. What was missing was the structure: booking and labels were all improvised, everyone left without knowing exactly where they would arrive. Starting without a goal gave us an advantage, because we arrived before others. But compared to the prevailing deconstruction, Matteo's Homesleep already seemed super professional to us: he had a studio, he had ideas, he had real ambitions.”
The result of that meeting is Rise and Fall of Academic Driftingreleased in 2001, the album that critics still consider the highest point of Italian post rock and which bears the vocal signature of Agostinelli himself in Pet Life Saver and Tram singer Paul Anderson in Little Victories. For Jukka and Corrado that period, and in particular the beginning of the 2000s, coincides with the group's moment of greatest strength: «You just need to review the videos of when they invited us to MTV to understand that there was something else, no longer just the reference to Marlene Kuntz or Massimo Volume: there was a world of our own, with a precise face and attitude». Within that world, they say, different references coexisted: Corrado drew more from Sonic Youth, Pavement, Dinosaur Jr., Jukka looked more at post punk and Fugazi. The meeting point, for both, was Blonde Redhead.
I ask Jukka what it was like, then, to go from youth centers like the one in Cavriago to the stages of MTV Day, on the other side of that border that usually separates those who watch from those who play. «We had some difficulties, but on a subconscious level we were already convinced of the music we were making». The most delicate moment for him was accepting the distribution of one of his subsequent albums through Sony: a choice that as a teenager he would have rejected on principle, but which turned out to be the only concrete way to get the music out there. “We didn't sell our soul to the devil, since we remained disgraced for the rest of our career,” he jokes.
What has kept everything together in these twenty years has been above all the fact that things have always worked well between them on a human level, even before a musical one. Even with personnel changes, evolutions and solo careers (the historic drummer Francesco Donadello is an appreciated producer who has also won Grammys and Emmys; Corrado has published records together with Emidio Clementi of Massimo Volume; Jukka founded the Spartiti project together with Max Collini of Offlaga Disco Pax), it is a point that they both insist on when I ask how they were then and how they are now. «If you look at us today, Corrado and I are two very different people», says Jukka. «And yet we have managed to stay together all this time: we already know what the other will say, with what posture he will do it». Corrado describes himself as the one who has always held the most “Apollonian” and organizational part of the group, managing dates and contacts (with little practical results, he admits laughing: «I always got the dates wrong, I always lost things»), while he attributes to Jukka the most chaotic and collective component, linked to an almost adolescent energy which, he says, «we still carry around a little today».
Photo: Jukka Reverberi
On the final balance, Corrado is clear: «I think we also had a lot of recognition. A small group like ours that after twenty, twenty-five years, still has people who identify with you, who see you, who listen to you, who buy a bootleg double vinyl that probably wouldn't have sold even when vinyl was still being sold.” And then the sentence which, I realize, tells better than any other the way in which the Mirò Gardens look at their history: «If the word success is the past participle of the verb to happen, something has happened».
Jukka, for his part, broadens the discussion to a more existential dimension, almost a small declaration of poetics. Playing in a band, keeping it alive for more than twenty years, was a way to leave a mark, so as not to disappear completely. «Everyone approaches the relationship with life in a different way, but in the end you also play to survive death, to leave something that remains when you are no longer here. We didn't want a normal life, we tried to make it different, and we tried with such tenacity that we managed to do it for more than twenty years, together. It's not bad.”
Before closing, let's go back to Almost home. There is something coherent, they both say, in the fact that the last concert of their history took place, by pure chance, in the same place where they grew up as a group, and that the recording remained hidden for years before resurfacing now, while the band is on hiatus. «For me it had a very strong effect to discover that, without wanting to, we also held our last concert there», says Corrado. «It's a very casual thing, and for this very reason very romantic». Jukka, for his part, prefers not to call it a sad story: “It just tells something, and it's a good story to tell.”
