Michele Ducci Talks New Album, His Hometown And More

What is your earliest musical memory?

I don’t have great childhood memories. However, it often comes to my mind when I listened to a song, I don’t remember which one, and the impact of the sound was a kind of kidnapping. It was afternoon, the rays of sunshine entered the room and I remember that the particles of dust almost gold-colored in the air mixed with the sound created an extremely strong emotion in me.

Your debut solo album ‘Sive’ is out now. How did you want to approach the making of the album? 

I wanted the record to proceed in a very natural way. I had the need to avoid any kind of “sauce” of arrangement and to experiment radically on the song form. It’s been a few years that I’ve been wondering what the way of music was, at least as far as I’m concerned… if it was a set of passing things that stand just because there are periods when one sound is fashionable rather than another, or if it was about finding your own inner voice, your own trait. In periods like these where there is a super use of editing, billions of voices to make one, millions of years and millions of people and stratospheric budgets to produce a record, I decided to do with what I had: piano and voice all recorded live on tape. Sive was recorded in 8 dayswithout stop in the manner of the “Take: Action”. For me, making music is an almost meditative need because it allows me to re-grab the duration. I love writing melodies because they have an indivisible, indestructible continuity in which the past enters the present and forms with it an undivided whole, which remains undivided and indivisible despite what is added to it at every moment or, rather, thanks to what is added to it. I had to go back to doing the poorest thing possible because for me making music is a kind of meditation. Essential as for those who do yoga in life.

 Where did you record the album and who produced it?

I recorded Sive in Italy at Amor mio Non Muore Studios and produced it together with Franco Naddei.

Who played with you on the album? 

In Sive I play everything, from the piano, to the choirs, to the keyboards. My girlfriend Letizia Mandolesi gave me a hand in the choirs for the feminine timbre that I love.

One of the tracks is ‘Nonesome’. What was the inspiration/story behind the track? 

I was alone at home, it was night. In front of me I had the prospect of quitting with music, I had many doubts about my passage on this planet. While I was at the piano I got this song improvising. The title “Nonesome” comes from the idea that the heart of the real is experience, but an experience of nothing and no one. Instead of “someone” I liked this “nonesome” because at least, personally, it’s like the nobody/someone who kidnaps me into the experience of beauty. A bit like when in that singular perceptual phenomenon called pareidolia we see a face and something appears without such an appearance being the appearance of someone already known. I give to this apparition the name “nonesome”. Although not grammatically correct, it always reminds me of the way of saying in Italian “non so che”.

What is the story/meaning behind the album’s title? 

Sive’ is a Latin word that comes from a phrase by the philosopher Spinoza: ‘Deus Sive Natura’. I spent a lot of time conversing with a great Italian philosopher and friend of mine Rocco Ronchi and this word imposed itself on me. I was not so interested in either God or Nature, but that sudden wandering, that transition, that becoming landscape, signalled by the term ‘sive’ which means ‘that is,’ almost ‘namely’. It’s a bit like when in a watercolour, or looking at the clouds or the stain in a wall, we notice a face and say ‘Here it is’! ‘Here it is again.’

What two things do you hope to have achieved once you have left the stage? 

That there is a feeling that something has changed. To have established between me and the public, and also with myself, an immanent communication to the absolute.

Do you have any favoured stage instruments, effects, pedals, microphones etc?

I love my microphone DPA D-facto. For a long time I tried almost all the microphones to find one with which I could feel good with my voice without having to do too much in mixing and with the DPA it was love at first sight.

 I love a small tool I recently found: the Casio Vl Tone 1. Let’s say that in general I use very different things depending on the needs of the songs. I go from guitars with three strings that I register on cassette to a whole set of other instruments that I would struggle to list.

Where is your hometown and could you please describe it in five words?

Forlì, near Bologna, in Italy.

Funny

Oblivion

Relative 

Lunatic 

Inconsistent 

Who designed/created the album artwork?

All the artwork on the record, from the watercolor to the photo, is made by me and my girlfriend Letizia, under whose name “Letizia Michele” we have a painting project.