▷S3E13 Uranio: the Unconfine-able Album by Ou

English

Feb 13

Ou has a new album, Uranio! Amy Denio translates for composer Ersilia Prosperi, and speaks for herself as Ersilia's producer and bandmate in this dynamic, multilingual band. The theme music of the Modo di Bere podcast comes from Ou's album Pisces Crisis. You can purchase Ou's first two albums at oumusic.bandcamp.com, and grab the new album at folderolrecords.bandcamp.com.

Uranio is the perfect album to investigate the connections between biodiversity and linguistic diversity. The title comes from the uranium from NATO's wargames that is affecting wildlife populations in Ersilia's ancestral home, Sardinia. Visit aforas.noblogs.org to learn about this issue.

To hear the story of Ou, and to hear some music from their first two albums, listen to our first interview with Ersilia and Amy, Season 1 Episode 11 of this podcast.

Ersilia's website: www.ersiliaprosperi.com/en

Amy's website: amydenio.me

Ascolta in italiano / Listen in Italian

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No, it's interesting. In Italian, they say, "I made a dream." They don't say, "I had a dream." Un sogno che ho fatto. That's really beautiful. It's a very different way of seeing the dream world, you know? In English, we say, "I had a dream." Like, almost like it was mine or... But, "I made a dream." It's just so much more Welcome to Motody Berry, the podcast about local drinks and local sayings. I'm your host, Rose Thomas Bannister. So excited, you guys, because I have some big news. Oh, the band who composed the theme music for this podcast has a new record out. If you listen to season one, episode 11 with Ercilia Prosperi and Amy DeNio, then you already know a lot about this band. If not, you can go back and listen to them. I'm sure you'll want to after you hear this interview today with Ercilia and Amy, about their new record, "Irania," which is out now on folder -roll records. And Celia and Amy are amazing musicians. They're both multi -instrumentalists. And the band "Owu" is really interesting to me because they sing in many different languages and dialects, starting with "Owu," which means "egg" in Sardinian, which I think is so cool. So, tell me Cioè, abbiamo messo un sacco, l 'abbiamo iniziato ad edistrarci. "Tell us about the themes of the album "Irania". È un disco che parla molto di quello che accade. We are here as musicians to change the world to a better place by Bringing all this into question. What is the family? I love the discourse on the album of the idea of nest needle is the first up first song on the album This means nest and it's it's about relationships. Are they nests or are they more? Cobwebs that that trap you that's a really beautiful metaphor that brings into question the function of of home. How can we bring the balance to an idea of living together, working together, collaborating together without trapping each other into this dysfunction? Ursula, I think, is one of the greatest geniuses I know, absolutely, who brings this sense of irony and urgency to look around us and question if we can accept this. And in fact, most of the time we cannot. So let's not accept what's going on. Let's find a way to bring a more positive spin to our relationships with everyone, to begin to communicate with strangers, to begin to advocate for open borders, to have empathy. - That's definitely what I'm interested in. But this work, this work that I'm doing, and can you explain about the base on Sardinia, like what that's about? The NATO base is, NATO, everyone understands, is the coalition of armed forces in Europe, and one of the biggest bases is on the coast of Sardinia, and they spend billions of dollars on war games to practice their new toys, which cost billions of dollars, euros, I should say, and this money could very easily go towards education, it could go towards refugees, it could go towards building a better society that's positive and supportive, but instead it's completely squandered on these ridiculous war games that result in the decimation of the land, the decimation of the sea, and has very toxic results because of depleted uranium, very toxic substances, that the war machine thinks is necessary for their toys. So that's really one of the reasons why this album is called Uranium, Uranio, to call this into question. Are these war games necessary? Is war really good for the economy? I'm not so sure. If you want a complete world of dead people, then yes, it's perfect for the economy. (singing in foreign language) Eu anilhar, escalar, notas malucar E sua, entre as rochas, cheia de lutas Lembranças do céu, Memórias de São Paulo Jogam as mundas Que adoram As que cantam nas mãos Bronzeadas Uma luta I'm not a linguistics expert. My background is more in wine and the biodiversity interest for me came through my studies in wine. So when I first started this podcast to put the linguistic diversity and the biodiversity together, I thought maybe I was coming up with some romantic idea. But the more I interview people over the last year and a half of working on this project. Whenever I talk to someone in linguistics who studies minoritized languages, they all tell me that people who study that were inspired directly by the environmentalists who were interested in biodiversity and that the extinction of animal species and the concern about that drew people to be more interested and to value more the rare and dying out, the languages that are dying out. So I'm learning that they're more connected than I thought. So definitely on this record, there's all these songs about animals. And so I really want to ask you about the connection between biodiversity and linguistic diversity on your record or any thoughts you have about that. (speaking in foreign language) - Biodiversity between language and nature is one and the same. There is a connection between everything. And really, when you understand that nothing is immutable, everything is going to be changing. Like when you look at a river, the civil core of engineers try to make a river nice and straight so they can have all the nice suburbs on either side and everything's gonna be nice and ordered. The river says, "No, I'm gonna follow "the path of least resistance. "This is the rule of nature. It has nothing to do with you civil engineers trying to control me because that's really a bad idea. So in biodiversity and in language, it's incredible in America right now how many dialects are springing to life Like on a daily basis. It's it's so interesting as I teach these students and they're using words I've never heard before and they're all the time Languages is always going to take on a form that reflects the very earth that we come from, the very environment that we're facing as global warming happens. I think our language is going to change as the ice is all melt. I think we're going to have developed new words like there were 100 ,000 words for snow before. We're going to have 100 ,000 words for heat very soon. I just think that biodiversity is a reflection of the mutability of nature and the ability to improvise, to accept and to go beyond what are perceived as limitations, but really they're not, they're just their inspirations for us to survive. There's a musical ornithologist from Hungary named Peter Szoké, who studied bird calls in the 1950s using modern technology. He recorded birds. When he slowed down these bird songs, he discovered that he was listening to Hungarian folk melodies and that he was listening to the cadence of the Hungarian language. Oh my God. But it was going so fast when you'd normally listen to a bird, you wouldn't know, but when you slow it down, it's like... So we intuitively comprehend this Almost without thinking, but we absorb this information from nature. So did he think the birds were? influencing us or The other way around influencing our language and our culture and everything there's so many animals on Oranio this new album Tell me the story of some of the animals and what they're talking about on Oranio. So the tortoise is the most persevering creature, it will always go forward and always find a way to make an alliance with that all around it, which is a great metaphor for our challenge as human beings. How do we make alliances? How do we persevere? We have to be patient. There's the myth of the tortoise and the hare. The tortoise is the one that wins because of perseverance and because of this indomitable will to create alliances. Alliances. [MUSIC] (singing in foreign language) (singing in foreign language) Now tell me what's going on with the octopus well Celia just described the function of the octopus okay first of all octopus can really represent the whole female reproductive system and that the female octopus while she's protecting her young isn't really able to feed herself very well so the male octopus offers a tentacle or so hopefully it, something nice, for the female to eat so that she can receive enough nutrition to be able to raise her brood. I had no idea that happened. It's a fantastic metaphor, a sort of a feminist stance of looking at nature and the balance of nature that women are, they're producers and they need the help of men who sometimes willingly give up part of themselves in order to help women. One hopes that this will continue to be the case. (upbeat music) 16 tentacles girl, I'm a flashing underwater deep Underwater change of color, love it all Dancing eventuals in a sense 16 tentacles girl, I'm a flashing underwater deep Underwater change of color, love it all Dancing (singing in foreign language) - Can you tell me more about the song "Turturella"? (speaking in foreign language) Arcilia in her house in Florence she has a morning dove or turtle dove that lives right over her front doorstep and every morning right at 8 o 'clock it wakes her up and she decided well I'm just going to have to record it because it's the most beautiful sound even if it's for an alarm clock it's really very soothing and she did so and it goes woohoo woohoo and she thought wait a second I'm going to arrange that sound into a composition in honor of this beautiful creature. She did so, so that's the basis of the music is from this beautiful bird that woke her up every morning in Florence. During the pandemic, she had this absolutely surreal dream that there was a gigantic duck flying through the sky and hanging from its beak was a neonatal baby, like a little tiny, not a little gigantic human baby hanging from the the bill of this duck and that really in fact we are all ducks but at the same time the song evolves to the breezes on a beautiful sunday afternoon no i mean there's a sense of of relief in some way that even though we might be tortured as gigantic ducks i mean that's really a metaphor for how we are as humans ducks you know we think of ourselves as physically like svelte and beautiful and graceful i guess ducks are too anyway it's a confluence of dreaming and reality and the pandemic and hoping for a better world is really how i'd describe the song [MUSIC] (soft piano music) No, it's interesting, in Italian they say, "I made a dream." They don't say, "I had a dream." Un sogno che ho fatto. That's really beautiful. It's a very different way of seeing the dream world. In English, we say, "I had a dream." Almost like it was mine. But I made a dream. It's just so much more poetic. We had this discussion on have children versus make children. It's just two different things in English, but maybe it's not really. What was the production process like on this album? This project started really a long time ago, this third album. And like any project that takes a long time, each of the pieces developed its own unique aspect. So my work was to try to make a coherent whole out of the entire project. I came into the actual process when things were more or less halfway done. I came to Rome about a year and a half ago to participate in recordings and to give suggestions as a producer and in general to kind of get the big picture of how things were going. With the great collaboration of really everyone in the group, but especially Ercilia obviously, the bassist Claudio Mosconi, he was the one that took over the mixes and remixes and remixes. I confronted the same situation or shall we say challenge with my own album recently where I had recorded stuff over four years and I thought, great, I'll put it together as a mixtape and Christmas and give it to my friends. When I put it all together, it sounded terrible. Individually, they're all beautiful pieces, but as a coherent whole, I had to work for two months to try to remix everything to make a coherent feeling. And we went through the same process with this, with Uraño, their individual, beautiful, amazing pieces. And then bit by bit, we found a way to build this one enormous sculpture, a beautiful musical adventure that's poetic, ironic, political, terrifying, very sad, and deeply touching. And we really hope that you enjoy it. - The Cecilia is saying that music is a way for us to confront these grand frustrations looking at the way the world is really going to health and that it can bring some joy. And it can also remind people to be critical of what's going on but mainly to bring some joy because otherwise we can just stay desperate and look at only at the negative but she also talked about her process of creating this album which is that as a composer she would wake up in the morning and really begin composing right away and sometimes the text would influence the the music and sometimes the music would influence the text and then she also described the first song Nido has words by a french poet that she works with in Madrid, and her name is Flora Gavain, and Flora wanted to live in Italy, right? But she was refused entrance. And when Erselia looked at the situation more closely, realized that the frontiers of Italy had been closed, causing the death of thousands of people. This is just very unjust and made her enraged. And so the concept of Mido as Nest became a metaphor too, for becoming entrapolated in this vicious, cruel situation where there's no way out of the nest, there's no way in the nest, her frustration at seeing the situation of people being refused entrance on the beaches of people go to, you know, like suddenly people are denied entry. It's ridiculous. My friend Tom Cora used to call the customs people boundary janitors. I think that's a very kind way to describe this concept of borders is basically it's based on human insecurity that mainly comes from patriarchy and from I mean when you look at the the history of the world for millennia women were more at the center of society and there was a much much more egalitarian balance of each person doing what they could do, not being stopped. Let's hope that we can move back to the feminist age. [MÚSICA] # hauria tunidó, tunidó, tunidó. # Me acopias, me castras, # me asfixias, molestas, # me odias, ciegas, persigues. # Si lo fuese, si yo podría volar... # volver. Dejaría sanidad a los que por ti migran Si lo fuese vos erías hogar y puerto Un refugio serías de la araña jodidas I remember listening to an interview with the, oh, that director who made Pan's Labyrinth. And people wanted to know if that fantasy story was, if it was real or not, if the monsters were real or if the little girl was hallucinating. And instead of answering the question, He said, "Well, let's talk about some things that we made up like borders." I think fantasies can, they can have a big impact in reality when we don't understand that they're fantasies. And that's why I think arts and music are so important. It's like the pure expression of the imagination as opposed to a perversion of the imagination. I just came across this concept the other day. When babies begin to speak they sing before they learn language when they begin to walk they dance with their balance learning how to understand their balance and when they begin to write they draw they don't write words they don't know what words are so basically we're all born with this artistic inclination to improvise and then only later are we hampered in these expressions to become more structured and more quadratic. There's so many things we could invent besides a system for control. What's the story with this album cover? La Stora dell 'Art, dell 'Art d 'Orch. Yes, the artwork was done. This is the third album done by the same artist. She's amazing. Her name is Resh Zeni. In this case, the artwork is a being of sorts, really trans. It's in between any discernible gender or genre. It's attached to the earth. It's attached to the sea. It's dancing. It's inviting connection between all beings. It's an absolutely perfect cover to represent the intentions of the message behind this album, which is that all things are connected and that we are all beings on this gigantic egg of a planet. And that's a lot why Ursulia chose the name Oh, which is egg and Sardinian, because eggs can contain any creature. You don't know what kind of creature is going to come out sometimes. You see an egg, you could be a dinosaur, who knows. So that's the whole idea of, oh, is that we create these eggs that are songs that contain all kinds of incredible beings and sensations and communications and connections that can bring us all together and make the world a better place. The idea is that there are no confines, there are no borders really between any of this energy. We'll just absolutely go through all of it and we have to understand that we are all connected. So music is the magic alchemical element that can do that through sound wave to bring us together in joy and dance. So there you go. We can all be better through music. Erci, I'm such a fan. You're-- - Oh, I'm Erci Namia, you are so fun. - So I want to direct our listeners to season one, episode 11, where we learn the story of Erci Leoprosperi, Anemi Denaio, and how they met and how they began to work together. We were introduced to the members of the band, the court of OU. So please check that out and learn a little more about the background and be introduced to everyone involved. This is really part two of that discussion where we're really focusing on this beautiful new record that's out now, O'Donnell. Don't hit me, hurt me, stop me, erase my soul Leave me alone, what's your fear? I need nobody, I'm a king in my home With a cheap thrill, chamberlain Where the hell is my court? It's really fabulous that you did the theme song 'Ercelia' 'cause I have Paladina Talle in my head almost every day and it's not a problem. Amy, any final thoughts about the record, the promotion process, the plans for the band? - Well, I'm just looking forward to the next album. I can't wait. And we hope to present this album. We'll see how it goes. We're looking for a formal presentation of the album in Rome this fall. (speaks in foreign language) (laughs) (speaks in foreign on. And then after that, we'll see. I know Estilia is one of the most prolific composers, making the most incredible music. It's in between all genres. She was talking before about the sort of trans genre, transgender, the aspect of the cover being a little bit between all, like it's really, it's not a specific thing. And so I really look forward to following this beautiful path, seeing what happens. - Thank you so much for sharing your music with Motodiberi and with the world. I hope that everybody hears this interview and gets excited and downloads this album so they can listen to it. - Right now it's available digitally on bandcamp .com. F -O -L -D -E -R -O -L, punto, bandcamp .com. - Great, so we'll put the link in the show notes as well. - Plans are underway to create a compact disc, but then also, we're planning to create a fantastic digital object, hopefully in the form of an egg, isn't that the idea? And videos. Ercilia has already helped to produce some beautiful videos, there's already a video on Polpo. Oh, great. And then also on Urranio, that's incredible. Where can we see these videos? On YouTube. What is the name of your YouTube channel? Ercilia Brósperi, faeda, channel. I'll put a link also to these videos in the show notes. Let me just say again the website where you can download this album is called folderallrecords .bandcamp .com that's f -o -l -d -e -r -o -l records .bandcamp .com. Is there anything else you want people to know? For For us, Noblogs is the website of this movement that in Sardinia fight against the invasion and the colonization of NATO armies. I will put that in the show notes. I don't want there to be this destruction of species in beautiful Sardinia. If you're hearing about this and you want to help, you can support this movement. I cannot think of a better album for students of all types of diversity and biodiversity and everything else. It's a beautiful atmosphere of sound across the whole album. It's so many different emotions and sensations just from the music. It just changes every second. It's really beautiful. There's so many emotions and so much humor and so much story in just the music itself before you even learn what the words mean. It's a fantastic album. I congratulate you. Oh, Guri, thank you so much for making it. I like to listen to your music when I'm walking in the park. I'll think about the birds and whether the birds speak in Brooklyn accents or not. They probably do. They probably do. It's such an honor to be in the same space with you, even online, really. You're such geniuses. I love everything you bring to the world. Thank you. I'm so glad the reference. Thank you so much for listening. This was the end of season three. It's a really exciting season, especially adding video episodes to YouTube. So while we wait for season four, I have some really fun bonus episodes planned for you. So if you haven't done it yet, if you've been thinking about becoming a paid supporter, you can go to patreon Barry, a special thank you to our Patreon supporters. You really do make this project possible. And for something free and wonderful, I want to let you know that the best way to find out about all the adventures at MotoDBerry is to sign up for the newsletter at MotoDBerry .com. Just put in your email. That's M -O -D -O -D -I -B -E -R -E .com for free weekly essays from all the writers at MotoDBerry magazine, updates on the podcast, updates on season four, and updates on that travel show that I keep talking about. So if you haven't signed up for the newsletter, I hope you do it now. Wherever you go and whatever you like to drink, always remember to enjoy your life and to never stop learning. Support us on Patreon. Grab the newsletter at MotoDBerry .com and subscribe to the YouTube channel at Motodiberry to watch the travel show Motodiberry TV. Music for the show was composed by Arcilia Prosperi for the band O. Purchase their music at the link in the notes.