Photo by Marco Stramaglia
Open your lazy lovely eyes
Dear, come and tell me of our past li(v)es
They were just metaphoric lines, metaphoric lines
But I didn’t mean, didn’t, didn’t tell you to burn your life
Love is a game ruled by Dionysian passions more often than reason, leading to accusations and misunderstandings, bound within the deepest recesses of the heart, eternally, with a power that transcends death itself. In fact, Oscar Wilde, once said “The Mystery of Love is Greater than Death”, and mused that love is also a mutual misunderstanding between two fools: this fairly well describes the theme behind the new, emotionally powerful track from Italian darkwave group VONAMOR. “Take Your Heart” implores living a life under the banner of love—with all the absurd ironies that come with its spontaneous energy bourn from desire over reason.
Language is an imperfect tool in an imperfect world, often too sharp or too blunt in describing our thoughts and feelings. More often than not these misunderstandings result in the most farcical of narratives unfolding in our lives. Do we learn to stray from the purity of our “spontaneous lightness” that prevails in our childhoods? In ‘Take Your Heart” a captivating avant-garde new-wave track, a dialog between a woman and her male counterpart enfolds. During the song, the man, or perhaps Animus half of the equation, ponders the future, paraphrasing Shakespeare with the acknowledgment that tomorrow is uncertain, being “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.”
The back a forth is left at an impasse, highlighting the absurd truth that it is truly impossible for anyone to truly understand the universe within, separate from their own. Regardless of its futility, this is a conversation worth having, and it charmingly ensures via an 80s call-and-response style throwback; with an ensnaring melody, that playfully entreats a surrender to the rhythm of the music.
There is a melange of aural elements to be found in “Take Your Heart”, many of them inspired by Coldwave, Post-Punk, Darkwave, and synth acts such as Atoms for Peace, Fever Ray, Woodkid, Kaelan Mikla, ACTORS, MISSIO, Daughter, SUUNS, Minuit Machine in this track.
“Through our darkwave music and words, we search for the question, the ambiguity, the multiform influence of a variety of demons. We feel the urgency of questioning ourselves, our fellow human beings and the reality around us,” says Giulia Bottaro.
VONAMOR is made up of sisters Giulia Bottaro (voice, bass, metal flute) and Francesca Bottaro (drum station, sequencer, sax, clarinet) and vocalist Luca Guidobaldi, with Francesco Bassoli (guitars and loops) and Martino Cappelli (guitars, mandolin, bouzouki, oud, loops) joining the trio for live performances. The band’s roots date back to 2016 Rome, when their focus was more cinematic, creating various scores for short films.
“We used the music in this album to walk paths that we hadn’t known before, to connect Rome to Paris to Berlin to Beijing, to mix techno music with folk, to let our voices and bodies mingle and dance to an incredibly weird yet familiar beat, and finally to search for a boom of love and light!” says Luca Guidobaldi.
The video is a charmingly-produced DIY glimpse into the world of two children, a likely metaphor for innocence, juxtaposed against the arguing adults.
Watch below:
Produced by Lucio Leoni, this 8-track collection, already available on streaming, will be released in February 2022 via Time To Kill Records (TTK) both digitally and on CD. It can be pre-ordered directly from Time To Kill Records.
Listen below:
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