Spyna
SPYNA, a sound and performance project born from the synergy between the artists Shara and Maple Juice, active in the Milanese underground scene.
An exclusive interview on the occasion of the launch of the debut single "Escape from Reality", which anticipates the full EP of 8 tracks, soon available on all platforms.
An acoustic and performative live experience that shapes a cathartic soundscape, a game between electronic and sentimental that is generated by the interaction between sampling, vocality, and narration, to explore the alienations of contemporary society.
Nolo, Milan, a historic woodworking atelier. We enter together with Maple Juice and Shara and discover that, going up the steps at the bottom of the room, there is a production studio, a non-chaotic chaos of keyboards, synths, vintage machinery, sub, an orderly agglomeration of percussion, various cables, a sofa, some empty cans. A timeless place where you play, create, listen.
Here was born Spyna, an electroacoustic project also visual and performative, a rewiring that synthesizes sound waves and poetic narration. Two artists, Maple and Shara, who understand the language of electronics as a means of action to explore the physical and metaphysical effects of music and the written and recited words, in songs that move, first of all, from an emotional concept, to tell the background noise of the human experience while you are living it.
Listening to Escape from reality, the first track of an eight-track EP, I hear obsessive but melancholic electronic vibrations, a nostalgia built on a layer of hyperpercussive drum machines, an elegant mix between downtempo and Detroit ghetto tech, narrated by a broken, distorted, stuck in a loop vocality, with the right melodic touch of rave cultures and spirituality. A unique experiment in the Milanese underground, SPYNA already makes us dance on heavy bass and distinctive rhythms of the '80-'90 style drum, an extensive use of vocal samples always sung live, leaving us time to focus on our energy and dance. The project, in addition to flawless production, pays close attention to the visual and performative aspect of the sound, offering itself as a reverberation of the experience of relationship with each other and with oneself. The music of Maple and Shara is above all a means of communicating an emotional concept, also through theatrical elements and light design, a cathartic moment that encourages a critical analysis of contemporary society, of urban alienation and the crazy rhythms to which it forces us.
The ‘nights of SPYNA’ are a meeting of people and bodies, consistent, dense visual and spatial depth, interaction with echoes of voice and beats that envelop all the senses.
Shara’s poems, vocal appearances above the drums, tell of a distant but present imaginary, a worn and nuanced reverb of those fragments of the past that we still want to remember. Distorted glitches and continuous loops help to enter a decelerated, almost spiritual and hypnotic condition. The vocoder, with its classic robotic and futuristic character, dissolves the story and the timbre, making the pulsating poetry ethereal and delicate. There is no final version of Spyna’s performances: everything is always live and unrepeatable. The project plays on the mechanisms of body memory and nostalgia, to create a moment in which the poetic word and music make possible a new form of conscious relationship with themselves and others, on the dancefloor.
Matilde: Maple, Shara, nice to be here with you guys! Tell me a bit about yourself, how the meeting took place from the creative point of view and how the SPYNA project shaped up.
Shara: We met here in Milan. I had already started producing tracks to transpose my poetry into electronics. Maple kindly offered to let me crash at his studio to record the voices. After listening to his live shows, it was a blink of an eye: the two sounds met, my melodic compositions came into synergy with sound design and Maple's machines, and SPYNA was born.
Maple Juice: I've been messing around with human and artificial voices for ages. I’ve always had a special interest in the vocal aspect of the sound, mostly sampled. The noise of the existing creates concept starting from something that does not belong to you, raw material that you can shape at your leisure. Using a voice over my tracks is an opportunity to work deeper, to touch more empathic frequencies starting from narrated text and rewire it on my game of machines making it become... music.
Matilde: What does this encounter between vocality and the word, a medium full of self-standing connotations, and the rhythm of electronics, more colorful and danceable?
Maple Juice: The moment it is sampled, the voice becomes an instrument. Then, it becomes a device, synthetic but not artificial. It maintains its original intrinsic poetics: that’s where the magic happens! The human hybridizes with the technological aspect of the device, so that you can maneuver and reshape it to your liking and make it something - let’s face it! – posthuman, cyborgian.
The voice comes in a close-up through the loops, chops, or melodies that are created by the voice of Shara that resonate to the music and live performance.
Matilde: Is everything always made ‘live’, including stolen sampling?
Maple Juice: Yes, it’s all pure live but not really improvised. We have a total knowledge and a sincere relationship of trust with the instrumentation we use, but each time we like to reshape our frequencies depending on the response of the audience and the tone of the space that welcomes us, expanding the universe of the possibilities of our music and changing the meaning of the text. Drum machines, vocoders, and loops are always different, always unpredictable: this fascinates us a lot.
Matilde: What kind of relationship do you have, or would you like to establish, with the audience surrounding your set?
Shara: I did a bunch of travelling in my life, for work and curiosity. In particular, it was important for me to meet other theatre artists, musicians, and performers. I absorbed influences of tribe music, more spiritual, and downtime, sounds so far from the urban and industrial world that we know well.
Maple Juice: The sound interaction with the environment and unexpected worlds immediately intrigued me, and SPYNA allows me to study. I tell you, we had to deal with the question of speed: the trend of the last few years is to travel on very fast rhythms, the drive to climb is strong and I have been out of step for years. A production of this type, over a live speech, would have no sense: it would have lost the contemplative character of poetry and would have become less intelligible the story, already complex in itself. Space, with speed, restricts the time of action. Instead, we would like the audience not to feel breathless and to let themselves be dragged into a hypnotic vortex, closer to meditation.
Shara: True! The idea is to create a cathartic moment for those who participate in the live, ranging between different rhythms. The musical journey, which I hope will also be an energetic journey, is a path that the body does by dancing and relating to space, time, and others.
Maple Juice Complexity, even in front of a dancing audience, is not necessarily that it does not arrive, on the contrary. We think of the conceptual trail of noise, industrial, ghettotech, "out of every compositional dynamic".
Matilde: Remember your last live, really a moment of decompression that allows you to loop in the loop, which definitely has a spiritual touch. Create an acoustic, sound, visual, narrative organism .... and there’s a story. You’re telling me something, and you’re telling me it loud!
Shara: Exactly, narration, through the vocal and acoustic distortion thanks to the vocoder, distinctly futuristic and almost nostalgic.
Matilde: and the ideal space for SPYNA, as you imagine, what shape does it have?
Maple Juice: The midst of the mob/crowd! The stage is to be abolished, absolutely. We use two microphones, and this helps because there is continuous feedback in the recording, which also captures the noises of people around, recalling a specific music in which the intros with the laughter, the chatter and the mess of people in the club were evident. I imagine the DJs in the middle of a large amphitheater, with the audience enveloping them on the bleachers. The public has to crush you, not the other way around.
Matilde: Maple, as a phonic device fetishist, how do we know you: where do your machines come from?
Maple Juice From here, from where we are now! I managed to get my hands on this drum machine, now a cult object, that made me discover the possibilities of live manipulation that I had never found in any other machine: It is now a true addiction for me! I’ve built an interlocking of machines that I can completely rely on. Basically, this one "does the rhythm" and allows you to use layer samples. Change the sound in seconds and in an instant, live, create a world. I accompany this first device, with a decidedly sharp and severe timbre, to an 8 bit 80s machine drum, with a very raw but groovie sound, similar to funky, which gives the rhythm a more light-hearted tone, less hard and more affordable at the listening level. An old vice: on the other hand, your musical memories and your acoustic background remain glued to you forever!
Matilde: Shara, where do the lyrics come from? How were they composed?
Shara: They are my original writings that, as I said, I sing with the vocoder breaking and plays on repeat and loop piece by piece. The poetics of each live SPYNA remains what you heard the other night, but declines and remodels from time to time in live performance, so that the word can take on different interpretations. Initially, I read the text: the sound is less dense and I read word for word. Then, I start playing around. I wrote Escape from reality about ten years ago now. Speaking of memories, it is true: they always return, in every creative process, they grow and change with us.
An exclusive interview with SPYNA
Interview MATILDE CRUCITTI
Video MARCO ZUCCHELLI
photography MARTINO RE VINTI
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