Hello,
there is something new under the sun: my side project Fifteen Strange Seconds is finally hitting the airwaves. The band consists of Andrea Gastaldello (keyboards, electronics, treatments) and I (vocals, treatments). We have just launched our first EP on Bandcamp, you can find it here.
I have also posted a lyric video for one of the songs, “This Time I Won’t Be Late”. The track features the great Eraldo Bernocchi on guitar.
What is Fifteen Strange Seconds? These songs were born in 2015 – yes, it only took us five years to release them! We do have more tracks ready, but we’ll see how this first batch goes (my problem with every new release right now is that they seem to go by unnoticed – not very motivating). So, one day Andrea approached me on Facebook and asked if I was interested in writing lyrics and singing on a bunch of electro-ambient pieces. That’s how it all started. I thought the material was very cool, and a nice departure from what I was doing at the time. As a matter of fact, it inspired me to write a set of moody, obscure lyrics, purposefully disturbing at times – I was definitely into Raymond Carver in those days. These “short poems” are my homage to a certain kind of left-of-center American literature. One of the tracks on the EP (“Last Night I Drove a Car”) is based on a poem by Beat Generation writer Gregory Corso (many times, during my university years, I would pay him a visit at the Protestant Cemetery in Rome). Also, the phrase “fifteen strange seconds” was extracted from “On The Road” by Jack Kerouac (I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn’t know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds). It was compelling to only focus on lyrics and melodies, for a change.
We hope that you enjoy the EP – feel free to let us know what you think. And I’m using this opportunity to wish you all a happy new year – hopefully, one without a global pandemic to deal with.
Marco Machera 