Ritornerai. Lo so ritornerai… sings Battiato.
That Ritornerai (You will come back) that we have said so many times in recent months, turning to the things we miss, to hugs, to dinners with friends, to singing in company, to concerts.
The same Ritornerai that has been chosen as the concept manifesto of Ortigia Sound System 2021 that for five days will revive that feeling of lightness and freedom that only live music can give.
From tomorrow, Wednesday, July 28, until Sunday, August 1, Ortigia will be the stage of the seventh edition of OSS, which includes a full program of concerts, DJ sets, talks and meetings.
Between Maniace, the Antico Mercato and the Lido OSS, some of the best Italian performers and artists of recent years will take turns. The line-up will include the names of Venerus, who blew everyone away this year with his album “Magica Musica”, Ginevra and Guido Cagiva, stars of Asian Fake Night, Calibro 35, Donato Dozzy and Eva Geist, who will perform with the project Il Quadro di Troisi, and composer, musician and producer Gigi Masin.
It continues with a breath of fresh air brought by the guys from Studio Murena and the special project L’Ora Blu, born from the encounter between saxophonist Gianni Gebbia, musician and producer Lamusa II and Sicilian DONATO.
One of the DJ sets will be organised by the guys from CIAO. Discoteca Italiana, a Turin-based collective formed by Andrea and Federico that organises club nights with a musical selection straight from the 60s and 70s.
In the last year, the collective has gained even more visibility and success by creating posters that combine music and song lyrics with graphics that are directly inspired by the aesthetics of election posters from fifty years ago.
We were lucky enough to have a chat with them, talk about music, art and get a sneak peek at their DJ set on 31 July. Don’t miss our interview below, visit the Ortigia Sound System website for all the info and follow their Instagram profile for all the updates!
Tell us who you are, what your background is and how you got started.
Federico and I have worked here in Turin in the field of musical events, concerts and DJ nights for years, and I managed a club called Astoria for several years. Then, a few years ago, we started these evenings, this series of events whose objective was to offer music from the past – we had the period from the 1960s to 1994 as a reference – and the idea was to create club nights aimed at a target audience of people between 20 and 30 years old with music released when they were not yet born or were very young. So there was this contrast and the music we chose was dance, songwriting or pop music.
We started touring a bit and from Turin we started doing gigs in Milan and then all over Italy, until last year, because of the lockdown, we were forced to stop.
How did your more graphic and poster art work come to life? And did you expect the feedback you got?
Parallel to our work in the clubs, we started to work on this graphic concept both for the promotion of the shows, also on Instagram, and for an action more similar to street art: we started to make posters of songs with an aesthetic that recalled the old electoral posters and hang them on the walls in Turin to cover racist or fascist phrases and writings.
Then, during the lockdown when we stopped, Federico and I noticed this interest in what we were doing on a communicative and graphic level.
Let’s say we knew we were doing something we liked, but certainly the success of the posters was completely unexpected, and it was people who first asked us where they could buy them, so we decided to open a shop.
As for the graphics, do you already have an idea that you adapt to the subject or do you let yourself be inspired by the music?
It rarely happens that you already have the graphic in mind before you choose the song or phrase. In our works, the concept of the graphic is closely linked to the lyrics of the song and our creative process goes in this direction. Sometimes we already have an idea for the layout of the lyrics, but let’s say 90% of the time we let the music and the words inspire the artwork.
On songs from the 60s, we have fun with the aesthetics of political posters, so we play with the contrast between the big words, typical of election messages and slogans, and love songs with melancholic lyrics. In general it’s a work that needs a lot of rehearsals, for each poster we do about 10 or 20 different drafts.
Speaking of music, why do you focus on the period from the 60s to 1994?
Well, as a starting point we have the first Sanremo, with pop music, and the first Genoese singer-songwriters. Then, for us, this discourse also has political and linguistic implications. The idea is that in that period Italy was at the highest level in a lot of disciplines: in design, in architecture, on a political level there was a language that had an impact not only on Italy but also on the rest of the world, there was a generation of intellectuals and literary men, musical authors and performers of the highest level. Italy had a real impact in those years, putting its vision and soul into all fields, including pop culture and music, for example. These were the years of Dalla, Battisti, Tenco, to name but a few.
All this, however, began to collapse when the Italian public language, the level of the political class and intellectuals also began to collapse, or, in our opinion, around 1994 when Berlusconi came into politics.
Let’s say that the course of the television and communication language around the 80s and 90s changed the relationship with pop music and Italian pop music.
Just out of curiosity, who are the contemporary Italian artists that you listen to and that have attracted your attention?
There are plenty, the first names that come to mind are Giorgio Poi, Calcutta, Andrea Poggio, Gemanò, Coma_Cose; there are Italian authors who have done some really cool things in the last 10 years. We don’t exclude that maybe we’ll do some impromptu releases on contemporary music, but it’s not in the pipeline for the moment.
Returning to posters, do you think that the interest in graphics and poster art is purely a question of aesthetics or because, perhaps, this art form somehow manages to convey messages and values in a new, immediate and original way?
Well, I sincerely hope the latter. It certainly depends a lot on who is doing the project, there are many projects that have little basis and if they were developed on a T-shirt and not on a poster it would be the same, and then there are very interesting poster art projects, which is a form closely linked to the past, it is one of the reasons why when we started we did not think we would have this success, this feedback. A poster on a wall is something that has to be thought about, that has to be reasoned with, if it is on the street. A quotation or a phrase of a certain type put on a wall has a different emotional and also historical-cultural impact compared to putting it on any other object, so the medium is important for us when we think about what kind of graphics and message we want to use. The medium changes the message.
Without spoiling too much, can you tell us something about what will happen on 31 July at OSS?
What will be there will be a bit different from what we usually do. The DJ set is called Ballabile Mediterranea and three guys will be playing: Francesco Mele, Giulio La Ferrara and Francesco Nig, each of whom has his own path and style. There will certainly be a large Mediterranean, Neapolitan or more generally southern Italian base. Let’s say we imagined the DJ set as a kind of coastal journey.
