Gazebo Penguins: when the pogo is good for the brain
The video of “Inospitale”, a song from “Temporale”, the new album of the Gazebo Penguins, coming out on March 21, is very amusing: it tells the benefits of Pogo as if it were a documentary. But there is more: the entire record project of the Correggio band, for over twenty years on the scenes with his Punk-post Hardcore, makes you embrace wild guitars and neuroscience, belligerent bass and philosophy of the mind, domineering sounds and Nietzschian philosophical theories. Yes, that’s just like that: it is a real concept album on the brain, but not brainy, which will be presented on an ad hoc tour. It is deduced from the title, which refers to the temporal lobe, a portion of the cerebral cortex. Nine songs that, just as our nervous system does, collect inputs, launch signals and postpone them back, generating a discharge of music that crosses the whole body.
Capra, each song is linked to a reflection, a phenomenon, or brightly brightly brightly brightly brought back Everything is filtered through your sound. Why was it important for you to start from the brain?
When we started thinking about the new album that we wanted to do, the idea was to move through limits: trying to see if putting constraints to our way of making music would have arisen a sense again. After 20 years and pass in which you play and write, the challenges can become the engine of your relationship with your songs. One of these was to decide a concept and sounds, even before putting ideas together.
Where did you go fish?
The sounds we wanted to experiment were linked to a certain type of music of the 80s, while the guiding thread wanted it to deal with the headwith the relationship of each I with your own head. From there, a disc on the brain. Try to see if we were able to close a record that had some neuroscience and a little philosophy of the mind inside. “Storm” That’s what came out. If we wanted to externalize in the highest systems, one could almost say that “How much” – where we tried to enter the dynamics of quantum physics – it was a record that told the world in which we live; “Storm” speaks of what we are, and why we think in a certain way (to be read with the voice of Corrado Guzzanti with that in hand).
How are you passionate about dense topics covered in songs?
The spark was an exam with the name that played me strange, namely: “methods of scientific knowledge”. At 40 I had taken the prillo to take a degree in philosophy, I came from a personal path linked to quantum mechanics, and I expected something that had to do with contemporary physics. But not even the shadow of physics, the “scientific knowledge” of the name of the course concerned cognitive science, and from there the passion for the philosophy of the mind, neuroscience and so on. It is to see that the study for this album will become the bibliography for an next degree thesis.
The beautiful thing is that I, like any other user, could listen to these songs without knowing anything about the processes or thinkers who inspired you and enjoy them the same. Was this the goal? However, do an accessible disk?
If you are saying that we have managed to make a disc on the brain without being brainy … it’s a nice compliment. But on the other hand, everything can be appreciated on several simultaneous levels: you can like a flower, but you will appreciate its differently highly highly highlights if you are an entomologist. You can admire a sunset and enjoy it, but you will judge more complex aspects if you have studied astronomy. The idea of inserting a bibliography on a musical album, if you want, is linked to this: for those who want to investigate, there are suggestions that can be deepened. We wanted to create a story that was complex, but without being responsible.
To get to where?
Talking about the brain in the end is also to highlight how much everything we do, think or desire to have an immediacy that is in the bachelorness (if I tell you to think of a hen, you do it without problems), but is actually put in motion by a hundred billions of neurons, in which each of them does nothing but download or not download an electrical signal. The more you go to the bottom, the more you notice the fragility of the system, and at the same time of its prodigious structure. We are that stuff there. Fragile and prodigious.
Lenny Ligabue, son of Luciano, in what helped you? How did you meet? Have you ever listened to a song to your father?
We met Lenny for good when she came with us on tour for some date. It was there that we discovered that it was also the phonic of the zoorecordingstudio – which is substantially where Ligabue plays – and that the study would have been available in autumn coming, just when we intended to put ourselves at work for the new album. It is an incredible study for the sense of welcome that we warned immediately. If the Liga has ever heard of the gazebos honestly I don’t know. But now I ask him.
Was the processing process different from previous discs?
We were lucky enough to be able to work in the studio without the coercive limits that a band usually must support when he decides to record a disc. Having a recording studio in which you can experiment and grow ideas is something that made us feel a bit like the Beatles in the late 1960s. The ideas grew directly in front of the mixer, they could seduce, be overturned or proliferated. Clearly creating a disc without testing it implies that, Afteronce the recordings are closed, you have to do the triple of the work in the room to bring that sound to a stage. The Beatles, on the other hand, had stopped doing concerts and the problem was solved. This is basically the only difference between us and the Beatles. It’s a joke.
What drives you to make music today?
It is probably the same reason that we had 20 years ago when our first album came out. We like to make songs, it is a enjoyment to play them, it is exciting to know that there are those who wait for them, and that sometimes they also make those who listen to them feel better. After all this time spent playing we have the clear awareness that we will never be fashionable nor have we been, but that we are proud of every song that we have released. And for us it’s worth it.
