On November 1st, hackedepicciotto released their very first live album, captured in a historic studio in Naples, Italy, that’s also the location in which they recorded their previous album, Keepsakes. The duo of Danielle DePicciotto (Crime and the City Solution) and Alexander Hacke (Einsturzende Neubatuen) returned to the large studio venue to stage two concerts with more than a hundred attendees and highlight their catalog of the past 20 years.
The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli) features music chosen specifically for its marked tendency to change over time through the course of their live performances, and the environment of the Auditorium Novecento, one of the oldest recording studios in Europe, with its acoustic properties also made the perfect location to capture something that hackedepicciotto has always found elusive and of-the-moment, the sound of their live shows. To mark this significant milestone, the album will be released on double vinyl, limited to 500 copies with exclusive signed print, and digitally via Mute.
I spoke with Danielle DePicciotto and Alexander Hacke about this much-needed live album project as they briefly paused their touring before starting again on a “Winter Tour” on November 1st, including a celebratory launch show for the album in Berlin on December 18th.
I think this live album was recorded was recorded in the same location as your previous album, Keepsakes, in Naples, right? Was your first experience so good there that you decided to return?
Alexander Hacke: To create and reproduce for audiences the stuff that we had actually created in that room felt great.
Danielle DePicciotto: We didn’t only play those songs, though.
You played a lot of songs from throughout your releases, spanning 20 years. Was it difficult to choose which ones would work best in that space?
Danielle: Not really. We kind of chose the ones that had changed the most. We do play with backing, so some of the songs changed very little, but these were the songs that were most live, and the ones that changed the most. We thought it was interesting to show how songs change through performing them live.
That’s a great idea. I love that. How large was the audience able to be in this space?
Alexander: It’s a proper, huge, live room. You could probably record a symphony orchestra there.
Danielle: Maybe 150 people.
Alexander: We had a little stage, with a little riser.
Does that aspect of the studio make it a destination for live recording for other artists?
Alexander: It should!
Danielle: It does. They have all kinds of projects who come there.
Alexander: They have a lot of community projects there because it’s right next to the University of Naples, apart from it being historical. There’s a poem of gratitude from Enrico Caruso on the wall, who recorded there. While we were in Naples, someone came there and recorded with like 25 people for the weekend. The studio is so big, and studios usually aren’t that big. It’s affordable, too. They don’t do concerts very often, since it really is a recording studio, but they do four or five a year.
I felt like I could hear a sense of space on the recordings, that there was ambient space, but it wasn’t large enough to create too much of an echo. It seems like a special way of recording.
Alexander: It’s acoustically sculpted for that. The thing is, really, you hear the spirit of a space like that. Nowadays, traditional recording studios are sort of obsolete because everyone records at home with a laptop, but these places do have a certain spirit to them. Like Sun Studios in Memphis, or Hitsville in Detroit, these are just rooms, but if you walk in that room and do whatever, it will be great. It’s a ritualistic space, a magic circle.
You mentioned that you chose these songs because they had changed through live performance over time, but I still feel like these are songs that need a lot of instrumentation, detail, and set up. Was that part of the planning, too?
Danielle: Oh, we switch all the time! I play the violin, put it down, pick up the hurdy gurdy. Within a song, I do it two or three times. Alex plays the drums, electronic things, the bass. We’re in constant motion. [Laughs]
Alexander: Logistics is part of our art. We’ve kind of perfected that, asking, “What can we bring, and what can we actually play within a six-minute piece of music? What can we not play? How can we represent that electronically?”
Danielle: But that space actually had the instruments that we had previously recorded on. The studio had a grand piano, tubular bells, and it had a little celeste. We actually had more instruments than we usually have! We’re known to be nuts!
Alexander: When we recorded there, we actually recorded electronic brass, then ran it through the PA in the room, so it sounded like it would be in the room. But then we played those same things live in that room again! A friend of ours went into Chernobyl and recorded the atmosphere in a deserted house, then played it in that house, and recorded it again. He played it back again until the whole room started singing! It was accumulating itself. To play these songs in that room felt a little bit like that! We were playing the room, in the room, in the room.
You were playing with your past selves! Now you’re part of the history of that place, too, having contributed to it.
Alexander: [Laughs] You leave your mark! It’s almost like quantum physics.
Was there a particular arc to the performance that you wanted to create for the audience in the individual concerts?
Danielle: It was basically two concerts, and we were presenting two different albums. For the first one, we were presenting The Silver Threshold, and for the second one, we were presenting Keepsakes. We always try to have a couple of songs from each album for each concert because of the different atmospheres that have for each album. Our albums are kind of the story of our last 14 years, basically, of becoming nomads, and the different stages we went through, like hope and despair.
For us, it’s kind of like telling a story through those songs, and that’s why one has to be there from each album. That ended up having the effect, for this album, that we had a really good cross-representation of all of the albums, and therefore of our history for the past 14 years. That kind of happened by chance, since we chose the songs that had changed the most, but it turned out that it was two from each album, and four from the last album. In previous shows, we were thinking more about what is possible to play live, since some are really difficult.
Alexander: It’s a matter of dynamics, also, to create a narrative. You make room with one piece to fill it with a heavy-duty narrative. There are strategies.
I love the way in which they are put together on this collection. I think they do relate to each other in that way. The sound is really wide-ranging, but the pacing is narrative. I can see why you opened with “Evermore”, which is a very spare duet, but would you like to comment on that?
Danielle: I love singing in harmony. It’s something that, no matter how I feel, I can start doing that. Sometimes throughout the pandemic, every day we’d sing all kinds of songs from our favorite artists, in harmony. We’d do that for an hour, and honestly, whatever has happened to you before, you’re happy afterwards. It’s the breathing and everything. It just makes you happy. It’s the best thing to counter depression that I’ve ever met.
It’s interesting, because when we record these albums, we often sing in harmony, like with “Troubadour”, but then when we perform live, we’ve noticed it’s difficult to sing them together with the backing. You can’t necessarily hear each other if there’s a huge bass. So we’ve ended up singing a lot of these songs, basically a cappella. We’ve noticed that it really gives us a lot of energy and it really has an impact on the audience, too. This was a song that has really changed from the original, which had instrumentation, so we chose it, but we also thought it was a great way to start the concert.
Alexander: When we did The Silver Threshold, we would always start the concert with an a cappella thing. It is pretty interesting for the audience, because they see all the instruments on stage, and our reputation for that is there, but then we stand there and sing in harmony instead! It leaves them nicely confused!
I hadn’t thought of that. That’s perfect. I see a challenge coming, though, for you two to do a whole album that’s just voice, and that would really confuse people!
Alexander: We will present it with no instruments.
I think the distance that you cover, sonically, on this album is great, since we’re talking about this a cappella track, but you also have “Third From The Sun”, which is very electronic. That one almost feels like science fiction. It made me think of looking at the history of the world, including modernity, from outside.
Danielle: I said to Alex, “Why don’t we do a song as if a UFO is flying in from outer space, and you hear the space sounds. What sounds would that UFO hear if it comes closer to Earth?” I love science fiction. I had this vision of the UFO flying close to earth, flying through the cities, then flying away.
Alexander: With the different cultures, too.
Danielle: That was exactly the idea. “Evermore” is so close to the heart, but then “Third From the Sun” zooms out into space. It goes to the eagles’ perspective.
Alexander: It ends with the morse code S.O.S., like “Help!”
I should have asked you this to begin with, but why is this your first live album? How did you decide to do this?
Alexander: It was the idea of playing the songs in the same environment in which they were created.
Danielle: We told Mute, “We were thinking of doing a live album…” And they reacted very strongly, so we thought, “Cool, we’ll do that.”
Alexander: A lot of what we do works because of the interaction between the two of us and the interaction with the audience. It’s an experience that’s very hard to capture and reproduce. We do our albums to capture this imagery, but when we play our music live, it’s more like a ritualistic thing where everyone in the room is having this experience together. To reproduce and capture that is really not a priority for us, but I’m really glad that we did it.
I can definitely understand that. Would you ever consider doing a video concert, capturing audio and video, so people could see how a live show would be?
Danielle: If we ever get good quality video. [Laughs] If somebody ever were to say, “Let’s film this,” that would be great, but we haven’t had that offer yet.
Alexander: I also really like the idea of augmenting reality in that way. I like Martin Scorsese’s documentary, Rolling Thunder Revue, where 80% of it is fictional.
You could develop the mythology behind your history with that. We look forward to seeing that version of events.
