Interview with ‘The Spiritual Bat’
SPIRITUAL BATS DISCOGRAPHY:
Spiritual Bats (vinyl EP, 1993)
Confession (CD, 1995)
Sacrament (CD ep 1999)
THE SPIRITUAL BAT DISCOGRAPHY
Through The Shadows (CD, 2008)
www.myspace.com/thespiritualbat (Through The Shadows)
www.myspace.com/thespiritualbats (Sacrament)
www.myspace.com/spiritualbats (Confession)
Nattsol: First of all, tell me about the foundation of ‘The Spiritual Bat’. As I understood, it’s a kind of evolution of the previous project ‘Spiritual Bats’?
Dario: Yes. The Spiritual Bat is a new project, conceived in 2004 in New York, but it is an evolution from the «Spiritual BatS» project which I had founded in 1992 with Matteo. Then we decided to split…due to different choices…
Nattsol: What are the main differences between these two projects? Why did you underline their relations in this way?
Dario: The main difference is that, although the music themes still come from me, now it’s just me and Rosetta, and the vocals are now hers. The line up on the CD is different, too, but it was different on each recording, anyway. With the name we chose to underline the continuity in the evolution. In the song Through The Shadows you can hear the passage from the old and the new Bats. The original name was actually Matteo’s idea, back in 1992. In 2004, as I said, he and I took each his own direction. For him the Spiritual BatS and gothic were dead and buried. But I had given my blood to this project, the music had come from my most intimate feelings, and I personally didn’t feel like abandoning or burying it. It’s like my child. Plus this name reflects perfectly my personal dimension of shadows. I myself didn’t feel so dead… so I playfully changed the name to the singular.
Nattsol: What are the project’s musical references? And how can you characterize the style of the project?
Dario: Well, that’s a difficult question. We don’t really worry about defining our style… It has been described by other people as old-school yet modern goth, Elegant Dark, Batcave, Gothic rock, with influences from the 80’s underground and post-punk: Siouxsie and The Banshees, Joy Division, Christian Death, Bauhaus, The Cure, but also Dead Can Dance, Classical music, Pink Floyd, with references to Shakespeare and Tolkien, and with a lot of imagery that makes the music feel like a sort of soundtrack. And in the instrumental tracks it leaves the listeners a space to participate, to create their own lyrics, their own story, their own film.
Rosetta: Actually, I personally listened to completely different music before meeting Dario, from Opera to Jazz, to ethnic music from gamelan, to ragas, African drumming and Cuban santeria ritual music… I don’t know if any of that can be heard in what I do, but it certainly is a part of me. I discovered gothic music late, but I don’t mind, because to me it’s still fresh and I feel as if I were eighteen years old.
Nattsol: Tell me, what is ‘The Spiritual Bat’ on stage? Which bands did you/would you like to share the stage with?
Dario: I have never liked playing live much… music for me is a very intimate dimension… So I didn’t even play in many concerts as Spiritual BatS (although I can say I had the pleasure of sharing the stage with Rozz Williams). With this new project we have just started playing out, because something has changed recently… I started getting very convincing letters from individuals who expressed the desire of experiencing The Spiritual Bat live … and then recently our friend and sound engineer Claudio passed away. He had been trying to convince me for years that a musician shouldn’t play only in his own studio… The last time I saw him we even argued a bit about it… That time he was really very emphatic about it…He kept on saying I just had to go and do it. Now I know that I have the duty to come out and play live for Claudio, and for those people who have written such touching words to me. I owe them. And this duty is beginning to turn into a pleasure…
Anyway… in the few gigs we had in the past there were projections and art installations… Maybe we’ll still do that …As far as who we would like to play with…of course with some bands who don’t exist anymore, like Joy Division, Siouxsie and the Banshees, Requiem In White… But there are a lot of bands out there today we are sure it would be fun to share the stage with, musicians who might give us emotions.
Nattsol: Do you have a plan to involve some other musicians for your shows?
Dario: Oh, certainly… The only reason we are presenting ourselves as a duo is for practical reasons, but our dream is to have a full line up again. Alessio and Bruno are two good friends of ours and excellent musicians who played drums and flute respectively on our last album, THROUGH THE SHADOWS … it was fun to finally work together… But they are also professional musicians, it’s their job… so we knew we couldn’t expect their presence with us “full time”… Hopefully they will be available again soon, or we’ll have to find other musicians who are as good….
Nattsol: What are the band members apart from the project?
Rosetta: I am an English conversation teacher (just by chance) and Dario is a composer. Music is a primary need, what fills our life with dreams, our days with action, our darkness with colour. It is the magic part of life, without which we would feel just as pieces of meat walking around the planet doing things just because everybody else is doing them. Nevertheless ,there are things that must be done to solve other primary needs in the physical world, which then ultimately allow us to make music. Time is never enough…And the things we like doing, like travelling, seeing our friends, going for a walk, cross country skiing, unfortunately have to compete against our work and music.
Nattsol: Now let’s speak about the new band’s album, called ‘Through the Shadows’. Tell me about it in your words. What is it about?
The Spiritual Bat: Through the Shadows is a rite of passage, the soundtrack of a change, the act of picking up the pieces once again, meditating, getting up and walking and running again after a paralysis… There is a song, “Twins” that was born while breathing in the ashes of New York in September 2001…This album reflects our sour observation of historical events, and something that is intimate, an intertwining of shadows and light, macrocosm and microcosm. It’s The Bat alighting on the ruins of collapsed symbols and broken oaths, to silently mourn the loss… awakening to the sound an ancient voice claiming eternal youth, but it has to march on, still in the maze of the nightmare, until it summons the ritual, the painful solution, the light…
Nattsol: You had the invited musicians there. Tell me more about them.
Rosetta: It is an honour for us to have Bruno Lombardi on the Flute. He has worked with Morricone, with Pavarotti, he has played at La Scala and around the world with most of the great directors in classical music. But he is also the type of musician who likes experimenting with other dimensions… What can we say… he is what we call a Maestro…He won a contest to enter the National RAI Symphonic Orchestra when he was eighteen…And yet he is not a snob, he just likes playing… Then we also have Alessio Santoni, an excellent drummer who can play any style… I actually played electro-acoustic drums myself in the previous line-up (Sacrament). But I needed somebody technically better than me to play my own drum arrangements for Through The Shadows, and Alessio was perfect, even though he told me sometimes my parts were kind of cerebral! I have a funny episode: there was one part, he told me, that couldn’t be done… but then I showed him how I had developed my drum arrangements by playing physically on the drums before programming… because even though my technique isn’t so good I have some intuitions (maybe I have them and they seem interesting to me just because I never liked studying traditional exercises)… At that point he told me, “Cool, you have taught me something new!”… And in few minutes he had learnt it… I was so proud of myself… and he was so great, fast, respectful and expressing his own personality at the same time.
Nattsol: Are there some ideas which stayed for the future releases? What should we wait from them?
Dario: Hey, we can’t predict the future…As soon as we find out we’ll let you know! We are already working on the next album, but a lot may happen between now and the end… we don’t know what to expect exactly, we’ll follow our instinct.
Nattsol: And the last ‘free’ question. What would you like to add to our interview?
The Spiritual Bat: Thank you so much for this space Nattsol! We’d love to come and visit you guys in Russia… We hope soon we’ll be able to come over and meet you and the scene in person!
Questions: Pall ‘Nattsol’ Zarutskiy
“Grave Jibes Fanzine”
