NAPLES – BARBARA DE DOMINICIS Posted On: March 9, 2012
Faraway Close… Over the past months, Julia Kent, Barbara De Dominicis and Davide Lonardi have been making a musical/visual/improvisatory record as Parallel 41, the imaginary parallel that ties Naples and New York on the same latitude line…. Q: Hi Barbara, as a way of introduction, could you tell me what your musical background is? A: Music was always very present in my household. My father wanted to be a jazz pianist and listened to a lot of classic jazz, Duke Ellington, Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans in particular. My mother on the other hand favoured American folk/rock music from the 60s and 70s. I also had an older sister who was into British punk and new wave and an aunt who lived with us who only listened to regional Italian popular music and fado. As a teenager, I studied classical piano for about 3-4 years. I then abandoned music for a number of years and studied Philosophy, which I was also later moved away from, as I had a tendency to do at the time with several things in my life. In my early twenties I was playing in a number of cover bands. I then spent some time in Berlin where I experimented performing something in between literature and music. In 2007 I was back in Naples collaborating with Mirko Signorile, Marco Messina and Davide Lonardi in Poe_Si. However, the first album I released on a proper label was Cabaret Noir (2004) where I played with Pasquale Bardaro, an amazing vibraphonist. Over the years, I also got more and more into experimenting with my voice and took a few workshops with Meredith Monk and Shelly Hirsch and even studied (for about a year or so) the Bel-Canto Technique. Then, when technology became more affordable, I got myself a laptop and started collecting field recordings, many of which were incorporated into Anti-Gone, the first and only album I recorded under my own name. Most sounds were heavily processed in that album, and everything was
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linked to Greek mythology. Water, for instance, represented Calypso whereas volcanic sounds recalled Medea. Q: Let’s talk about Parallel 41, a project that connects Naples to New York. How did it come about? A: The whole project developed though different stages and started around 2004-2005 in New York with a series of field recordings. At the time I recorded hours and hours of sounds, a bit like someone just starting out as a photographer tends to snap away. At first, I even went around holding my laptop open on the palm of one hand and holding a microphone with the other… Q: That must have been very practical… A: Absolutely and also very discreet… it was ideal, really… Anyhow, at the same time I was collecting sounds from Naples, which is my hometown and I was drawn by the similarities. The next phase of Parallel 41 involved my meeting with Julia. We didn’t meet specifically for this project, which we only devised at a much later stage. We met online. I’d heard her still unreleased music, which was to become her fist solo album Delay, and fell in love with the unconventional imagination, her round sound and gorgeous compositions. We initiated a rather casual email correspondence and we started thinking about the possibility of playing together. We finally met up back in 2008 at the
Photography courtesy of Davide Lonardi
airport in Venice. We drove straight down all the way from Venice to Catania for a gig organised by Andrea Pennisi. We’d agreed to play together at the Nando Greco Theatre in the historical centre of the city, which at the time faced closure and had been occupied by a group of actors and performers just like the Teatro Valle in Rome is today. They were holding events to raise finances and I am happy to say that they eventually succeeded in keeping the theatre open. We got there a day late though and had to postpone the gig, as the weather was crazy. It was March but we got caught up in a snowstorm in Campania and had to spend the night there. Q: Considering you didn’t know each other and you were playing together for the first time, did you give yourselves any sort of guidelines? A: Not really, no. We hadn’t even rehearsed or anything, and in a way it was a crazy idea. We studied each other, and we listened to each other, tiptoeing around one another with timidity. We basically got to know each other by performing together. Two days later, we were back on the other side of the peninsula for a concert in Padova. Travelling