Whitemary: “I got tired of rejecting melancholy”

Whitemary, stage name of Biancamaria Scoccia, shows herself with horns on the cover of her new album “New Bianchini”which he also wears during live performances. A devil of electronics and a libertine lover of the word. “I built them – he says – my grandmother, when I was a little girl, taught me how to make objects. I have never been in line with that classic feminine profile of beads and sequins, even if there are some beads between the horns. And then ears emerge. There are more readings. In general, I wanted the horns and chose them at random, I just wanted something aesthetically strong for the live shows. Then I realized, when wearing them, that they convey a ‘leave me alone, go’ and at the same time a sense of ‘fuck it’. In this project I say things that I struggled to bring out, and now the horns have sprouted…(smiles, ed.)”.

“New Bianchini” is the artist’s second official album after the EP “Alter Boy!!!” of 2019 and “Radio Whitemary” of 2022and from the first listens it is perceived as an act of freedom. A few synth notes, the sound of the kick drum, the bass and the timbre of her voice, halfway between speech and jazz-style singing, are enough to elevate Whitemary. A mix of straight bass drum and piercing mantras, of lightness and depth, of expressive urgency and sonic refinement. “In this project I brought out the darkness, I realized that I didn’t have to give up melancholy and sadness to convey an image of myself that didn’t correspond to me – she says – at the same time this is not a pessimistic record. I asked myself questions, I opened new doors and I closed others. It’s a very different album from anything I’ve done in the past because I needed to go to new dimensions. And the approach to work was also different. I usually started from the production and then the sound gave me the words, here I started from the writing. For a year and a half I wrote a lot, not to make songs, but for myself. And this helped me a lot to understand what I wanted to express”. Whitemary does everything herself. From the sounds to the arrangements, to the productions, up to the graphics of his records. An exquisitely DIY approach. A chapter proudly homemade and perfect precisely in its desire to be imperfect, free, messed up and pure.

“I was so bored with myself – he underlines – I had played and resonated with the previous albums, I felt the need for new music, but above all also for new words and languages. This project has a particular attention to lyrics. There are some, for example, which are very personal and direct, as in a kind of self-therapy exposed to the public, but also profoundly open in some way, universal. It’s a nocturnal project, perhaps more wintry yes, but there’s certainly some light filtering in, there’s also some heat.” And then there is music that makes you dance or unexpectedly veers towards a softer sound depending on the feelings it wants to express.. Whitemary also announced the new tour: it starts on January 17th at the Locomotiv Club in Bologna and then continues on the 23rd at the Magazzini Generali in Milan, on the 24th at the Hiroshima Mon Amour in Turin, on the 25th at the Urban in Perugia, on the 6th and 7th February at the Monk in Rome, on the 21st at the Duel Club in Pozzuoli and on the 22nd at the Eremo Club in Molfetta. “When I write I think a lot about the live performance – he concludes – I often put intros and outros in the songs to allow the audience to get inside the songs and for those who mix them to move from one song to another. I’m happy for this tour because it goes through slightly bigger spaces. The freedom I took for this album was certainly possible because I work with 42 Records, who have never put any kind of pressure on meallowed me to experiment. On this journey there was a lot of music to keep me company and inspire me, an artist that I consumed Totally Enormous Extinct Dinosaurs”.