‘Even Before’ is the second single from the ‘live in the studio’ album ‘NUBA Live Tape’, by Michele Ducci. The album contains alternative versions of 3 tracks from his debut album, ‘SIVE’, released in June 2024, along with 4 new songs.
‘Even Before’ starts as an upbeat Samba played on a Bontempi keyboard, a sunny love song with an uplifting chorus:
“Sunshine
Rain falling
I know what my love means
When the day rises
And I was smiling even before”
The track then slows into a dreamy waltz for the outro. Letizia Mandolesi’s bright backing vocals in the chorus and delicate sighs in the outro beautifully accentuate Ducci’s warm melodic vocals. Accompanying the single is a cosmic animated video created by Ducci and Mandolesi.
About the song, Ducci says, “Even Before was born in scenes, as a movie. I had found a ten euro Bontempi keyboard and I let it do almost everything, playing it all live together with Letizia.
I have been reflecting for a long time on the absolute of change: it gives itself as an inverted perspective. It’s like a chorus in a song: coexistence of past and present, of a past that insists on a present that coexists with it and that, passing by, is the intrusion of an unpredictable novelty. You always find yourself in the middle of an act that was already in action before it was done and that, being fulfilled, becomes something that is no longer possible but fatally real. Deja: Jamais: Encore. It is an eternal return that is like a magical infinitesimal calculation, lived in the depths of what I call myself. It is the experience, the passage, that resonates in its immediate data like a chorus: an ocean of sive, of ‘that is’, that are the foundation of every ‘where’ and every ‘when’, as in the passages between verse and chorus: an incessant translation into, which is a crossing, not an impasse, but an impassage: an even before to which we must go back to probe the experience in its immediate data. It is an experience of variation that is done at the limit, near infinity.
Letizia and I drew the video by hand, and it is a sort of twin of the song: a cosmic paraeidolia…the experience that makes itself felt in the foreground like a procession of faces still in the making: a chorus. The song as a sort of paramnestic paraeidolia of creative evolution. All of my work is all about that.”
On the video, Ducci explains, “I have thought for a long time about those passages that are given as an inverted perspective, as in the intuitions on the Pavel Florenskij icon. A before of the before on which the musical chorus seem to tell me a lot. After ‘It’s Hard to be Easily Loved’ it anticipates a live tape album that will comes out in a few days: NUBA Live Tape. A video that is another way to say the song: an obsessive search for the chorus as paraeidolia of creative evolution. All my work, after all, for years, in many ways even senseless maybe, but of vital importance to live also with joy, is on this: immanence suffered, like those who had completely lost their memory, and the songs that are lives, nunzi, people who knock on my door, waking me up every time who knows where.”
‘Even Before’ is out 22nd January via Monotreme Records.
‘Nuba Live Tape’ is out 24th January via Monotreme Records.
Michele Ducci will appear live at Bronson Club in Ravenna, Italy on January 31st.
