MY GRAVITY GIRLS

"I MISS SOMETHING AND MISS EVERYONE”

LP/Digital – Weakmusic - 25 September 2020

Founded twelve years ago with an original line-up of whom only two members remain, My Gravity Girls from the Emilia Romagna region in Italy are back after four years since their last studio album. A hiatus justified by a difficult period, which at various points saw the very existence of the band put into question, a prospect which frontman Mattia Bergonzi finally reacted to with a new-found love for music, experimenting and for the research of sound. This rebirth began after listening to the album, FLOTUS by Lambchop, which rekindled his love of working in a recording studio to such an extent that he decided to build his own private studio in which he could experiment in absolute freedom. The realization of the studio, completed in one year, was followed by the creation of a brand new line-up - made up of the band’s original members (Mattia and drummer Pietro Ruggeri), Francesco Carlucci (keyboards and synthesizers) and brothers Claudio (bass guitar, synths, backing vocals and piano) and Simone Calandra (drums) - accompanied by an assortment of new instruments, some of which Mattia had never even composed for: “I would spend nights at home recording voice loops and transforming them into synth sounds; or recording guitar riffs only to go and destroy them with digital effects making them unrecognizable.” Many of the tracks, for example, were generated either from electronic beats or those created with actual drums, there are synths created from processed vocal samples inspired by working on the spatiality of sound using different types of reverbs. The result is a dark but at the same time airy dream-pop oscillating between ethereal and suspended atmospheres and transparent emotionalism.

Forests is the first single extracted from My Gravity Girls' upcoming new album I Miss Something And Miss Everyone.

'I MISS SOMETHING AND MISS EVERYONE'
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From this point of view the opening track, entrusted to “Intimacy”, is an impeccable declaration of intents: a dark piece, where hermetic and melancholic lyrics are set against a musical part born from playing with instruments and electronics (“I created the almost noisy drone, at the base of the melody, one night in the studio by re-amping the bass sound of a synth through an analogue synthesizer and sending it into a bass amplifier. Then I placed two enormous drum cymbals in front of the bass amp and using two microphones recorded the refraction of the bass vibrations on the cymbals. Meanwhile, I adjusted the note with an effect by modifying its pitch.”). 

In the following track, “Forests”, an ambient texture is progressively supported by a regular drumbeat. The synth at the base of song was built with a sample of Mattia’s voice playing in unison a single note. Also in “Wide Eyes” the synth, which marches incessantly, was created from a vocal sample, while the distorted electronic drumbeat was played entirely and not programmed by Pietro on a 1980s Roland. 

The song is about those moments in which you can’t get to sleep because your thoughts overwhelm you and you realize that not even the warm light of dawn can give you the strength to carry on.                                                        “Daybreak” is a jewel of electronic pop built around a synth sound which has by now become a standard, despite it resembling a toy: The Teenage Engineering OP1. Mattia says “I learned of its existence whilst reading an interview with Pharrel and then later in a Justin Vernon interview in which he described having used the synthesizer to replace a guitar. And then I ended up doing the same, the more I continued to play with it, the more I understood its potential. Most of the songs come from loops created during the night sat on the sofa with my headphones and the OP1.”  

“Berlin”, dedicated to the city in which its lyrics were written, is a track for guitar, recorded entirely and then looped as if played by a computer starting over and over again. Even the sounds that come in and out, which may seem like synths, actually came to life from the same recording and were later processed with various overlapping layers of reverbs. The beats were made with a Roland TR 808 and halfway through overdubbing acoustic guitars can be found made to play backwards and reverberated, whilst the vintage sounding synths at the end were played by Aldo Bergonzi, Mattia’s uncle. 

In “Blank Space” the synths reign thanks to the reverb that adds further spatiality to the entire sound of the track. The story of how “Schitzophrenia” came to life is told in Mattia’s own words: “This is a special song. I’m sometimes inclined to obsess over certain subjects and I went through a phase in which I would do a lot of research into mental illness. I’d watch a whole load of documentaries, and one day on YouTube I found this 1950s interview with a person with schizophrenia. I was really drawn to his tone of voice and so I thought of trying to record him with the OP1 mic directly from the computer speakers.  

Then I started playing the beat, again using the OP1, and playing the synth as a melody on top. In the studio we re-recorded all the drums and halfway through added an out-of-tune piano. The lyrics are about those times in which you are at breaking point and you see it coming but can do nothing to stop the ‘free fall’. “Family Life” is a very ‘gaunt’ track about the conflict and disappointment which lead people to distance themselves from each other within family life or as a couple; when there’s nothing left between them, they drift so far apart that even all the moments spent together seem as cold as the worst winter day.

A certain sense of existential despair also irradiates in the following two tracks, the more acoustic “Five AM”, with its distorted drums tail, and “Silver lake”, built on obsessive loops, just like those memories you wish you could forget. “May”, is the track nearest to the sound found in the band’s earlier works, whilst being filtered by a fair amount of electronic and digital effects, with extremely long reverbs to which an old Farfisa organ has been added. The album’s closing track is the dreamy “Ann”, built with an arpeggiator created on a synth called Organelle, which gives it a sound on the border between gospel and the rural chanting of chain gangs in America’s Deep South during the early 20th century. 

Produced, recorded, mixed and mastered in its entirety by the band, in their own new studio (The Catcher, just on the outskirts of Parma), “I Miss Something I Miss Everyone” will be released this September by Weakmusic, a label founded by My Gravity Girls themselves. The album comes at the end of a long stretch of road, full of ‘potholes’, but still fertile, terminal, but at the same time a new starting point, especially since, thanks to their own studio - ever more enhanced by new instruments and devilry - as well as their newly founded label, the band are also hoping to open another phase, one of producing and publishing music projects by other artists alike. 

My Gravity Girls
Mattia Bergonzi: voice, guitar and programming
Claudio Calandra: bass, synths, backing vocals and piano
Simone Calandra: drums
Francesco Carlucci: keyboards and synths
Pietro Ruggeri: drums

Francesco Montali: drums on “Intimacy”
Daniele Nigro: added guitars on “Berlin” and “Five A.M”
Aldo Bergonzi: synths on “Berlin”.

“I Miss Something and Miss Everyone”
01 - Intimacy
02 - Forests
03 - Wide Eyes
04 - Daybreak
05 - Berlin
06 - Blank Space
07 - Schitzophrenia
08 - Family Life
09 - Five AM
10 - Silver Lake
11 - May
12 - Ann 

Lyrics: Mattia Bergonzi
Music: My Gravity Girls
Recorded and mixed at The Catcher
Mastering: My Gravity Girls.

Discography
“THE Curiosity For The Animals Remains” (2010)
“IRRELEVANT Pieces Vol.1” Ep (2016)
“IRRELEVANT Pieces Vol.2” (2016)

https://mygravitygirls.bandcamp.com
https://soundcloud.com/my-gravity-girls
https://www.facebook.com/mygravitygirls/
https://www.instagram.com/mygravitygirls/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCPitOtBY1ZV9JxjiZ78C4ow

Management

luca@mygravitygirls.com
management@mygravitygirls.com

Press Office: PITBELLULA
rossana@pitbellula.com