We Speak Music
Michele Ducci releases intimate new single ‘River’
Michele Ducci was the ‘M’ in the electro-pop duo ‘M+A’, who released two albums on Monotreme Records, the second of which, ‘These Days’, earned the band a place in The Guardian’s ‘best new bands of 2014’ list and saw them perform live on the Pyramid Stage at Glastonbury and at the Venice Biennale.
The duo then formed a new project, Santii, which involved several Hip Hop artists including Rejjie Snow, Mick Jenkins and Music Producer Supah Mario (Drake, Young Thug), releasing two EPs on Italian label Sugar Records before going their separate ways due to artistic differences.
A short stint in another band led Michele to realize that he wanted to make music on his own, away from external commercial or career pressures. Says Michele, “I went back to the house where I was born and where I first started playing. After the pandemic I had practically no instruments anymore except a guitar with three strings and a pianola. I needed to make a record that I had never been able to make and that I had always dreamed of making. Something very essential: with the piano and the voice.”
‘SIVE’ encompasses a range of styles, from the dreamy singer/songwriter tones of ‘Feelings’, ‘Here You Are’, and ‘Nonesome’to the uptempo pop of ‘You Lay the Path’, RnB-infused ‘Just Because’ and percussive Beat poetry of ‘Hic’. Album opener and first single, ’River’, is a poignant ballad that winds along like its title, opening with the quiet intimacy of hushed vocals and piano and detailing the time he desired to leave the music world behind: “They call my name but I’m a river”.
About ‘River’, Michele says: “I was in New York for musical reasons in a situation of psychic and metropolitan traffic, in which every mention of my name in relation to the artistic career and the pressures of that world had nothing to do with music, I was so saturated that I could feel myself only in the moving waves of the Hudson River. “You and I”, I said to myself, ” are from the same origin”.
The album will be released on CD in a colour printed card wallet as well as digitally. Pre-order CD here:
https://monotremerecords.limitedrun.com/products/758779
Michele Ducci has unveiled the second single, ‘Woman Like You’, from his forthcoming album and animated film ‘Snail in the Clouds’.
‘Woman Like You’ pairs bright distorted electric guitar with an electronic drumbeat, adding in Ducci’s soulful vocals and a catchy uplifting chorus with Letizia Mandoleisi’s sweet vocal harmonies. A vintage organ pedalboard operated by Ducci simultaneously generates chords, bass and rhythm, like a one-man band. Shane Kennedy (Girl in the Year Above) joins in on guitar. Simon Milner (Is Tropical, Ysing) recorded and produced the track at his 4am Studios in London.
The album and film tell the story of a planet called ‘Snail’, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music. There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the ark of melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
The video for the single, created and animated by Ducci and Mandoleisi, delves further into the realm of planet ‘Snail’:
Says Ducci, “The ark of melodies, after various attempts, finally starts to work and fly in the planet Snail, while the shady Doc. Sub. and Agostos, with their platoon of soldiers made of foggy smoke, spy the miracle, planning to steal the ark for their evil and tyrannical purposes.”
About the track, Michele says, “I wrote this song for my love Letizia. Love seen from the mind is the sound we make. Sound is the love of matter.
We used a Technics synthesizer organ from a flea market. I tried to find a mood that was right for the song and I started using the bass of the pedal board together with the synth and the drums, and it was magical to hear the song reveal itself all coming from a single instrument. Leti was singing with me and we recorded everything live in one shot. Then we made Shane do the guitar flight, as if he came out of the window. The idea was to maintain disproportions, guitar thrust and synth drum thinness a la Haroumi Hosono, so as to create an estrangement, but naturally: it’s about how I listen, with close up something that captures me in its nuance as element of a larger orchestra somewhere. I’m glad we decided in the studio with Simon to use the layers of arrangement as the close-ups in the cinema; they look like strange enlargements that perch on parts of a mutated orchestra. I’m happy to come back with this love song at a time when everything seems to opt, even my labor in managing the flows of selfishness that have poured out on me while doing this album, for the sound of war. I’m here happy to be able to say that the sound of love always wins as did for me. Snail in the clouds is one of the most important works in my life and I am glad to start from pure love for this album that is my son.”
The album and full-length film will be released on the 5th of June on Monotreme Records.
Michele and Letizia’s previous musical short film, ‘The Great Book of Nature’, is an official selection for the 2026 Venice Shorts Film Festival.
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