Recall Madame X recently released a new album full of dark, mysterious post punk.

Originally born in 2007 as Madame X, the designer and musician Alessandro De Benedetti and the multi-instrumentalist and sound engineer Andrea Zuccotti return with their own musical project renamed Recall Madame X. The band described their record as an unconscious journey through the memories of childhood and adolescence. A sound therapeutic path, a purifying catharsis.

‘Unconscious ID’ was released October 31st via Madre Sublime. It’s a dark album clearly influenced by 80s underground. A perfect soundtrack for those who would like to travel back to the underground clubs full of fashion freaks, goths and whatnot. It’s a cinematic experience.

You’ve been creating together for a while now. When and how did you originally meet?

Alessandro: The musical association with Andrea dates back to the time when we both lived in Genoa. The Psycho Club was our second home, a dark music club in the late 1980s and at that time we started writing using a 4-track cassette deck (which we still hear the rustle of today …), a Roland 303 and an old Eko guitar. The Madame X project, on the other hand, was born many years later, in 2007 in Milan. The basic idea was to evoke an electro, post punk / wave sound, with cinematic, dreamlike atmospheres, tribal beats and completely deconstructed songs. An ideal sound environment to tell our teenage ghosts and deal with our spleen.

“A therapeutic journey in a period of total isolation”

Italy was hit very hard by the first wave of pandemic. Did it have any impact on your songwriting or the atmosphere of the album?

Andrea: Let’s say we always had a very introspective and dark feeling, regardless of the pandemic. Surely the darkest period of 2020 worked as a particle accelerator for us, pushing us to write the whole album quickly, in a kind of muffled limbo that protected us from the outside world and pushed us more and more to the depths of the soul, and also back in time. Physical distance seems to have optimized the closeness of spirit between us. It was a therapeutic journey in a period of total isolation.

How long have you been working on your latest album, ‘Unconscious ID’?

Andrea: The album was written in 2020, using the phone to bounce takes of backing tracks, cues and vocal lines, almost always starting from hypnotic loops stolen from Alessandro’s Groovebox Roland MC-303, in which overdub voices effect and synth. We worked remotely during the months of the lockdown, exchanging files over the phone almost every morning, melodies sung on the iPhone, rhythm sequences and bass lines, waiting to see each other again to mix together material that had come out very raw, to sometimes violent and disturbing, but which we have always felt very much ours and sincere from the beginning, in every fragment. I spent nights recording long drafts on the piano, from which we then extracted the most dreamlike and cinematic sequences, and then overlay analog tracks using a Korg MS-10, an old Moog, noise-style guitars and straight, stubborn and always with the right amount of overdrive. The voices of our female guests were filmed remotely, always using the phone, exchanging texts, bases and tracks via WhatsApp. In the studio we used Cubase 11 to arrange and do the entire production of the songs. The drum beats, on the other hand, were recorded later on at Paolo Gozzetti’s studio (SigmaTibet, Italoconnection) who then also mastered the entire album.

“A very complex concept, a sort of inner voyeurism”

What do you mean by “unconscious ID”? Is there a certain concept behind it?

Alessandro: It is a very complex concept, a sort of inner voyeurism. A stratification of maternal and social imprinting lives, adolescent traumatic experiences and dreams, feelings that end up composing the personality of every human being. An envelope of sonorous offal, assertive voices of altered women, abstract lyrics: they represent the experience of marginalization, the violence suffered, always feeling out of place and out of phase in a well-meaning, heavy and humanly detached society. Each song is an unconscious journey into the memory of what hurt us, forming our adult personality. We entered our cave, and ‘Unconscious ID’ tells us what we found. The artwork on the record also follows this. concept: Marco Cendron and Matteo Verrani perfectly interpreted the meaning of the work, starting from a series of photographs of the faces of people who and have marked our life and our experiences, through the application of artificial intelligence and the rendering process, they have created the effigy of the face of our unconscious personality.

If you had the opportunity to collaborate with someone, who would you choose and why?

Alessandro: In a parallel reality I would like to duet with Danielle Dax and with Gitane Demone! The first for the absurd high voice and the second because the choruses of her, in the first Christian Death albums, were dreamily unique.

You can share a few more words about the making of ‘Demetra’, a song that we recently premiered.

Andrea: It is the only track on the album that started from a bass line to which I superimposed an extremely tight rhythm and then the very nervous and noisy guitars, which look a little to Soft Moon and a little to Joy Division. Let’s say that it is a piece that could have been born in the rehearsal room, but the rehearsal room was closed …. Then Alessandro had the brilliant idea to reverse verse and chorus (in fact we spent hours on the phone trying to understand what the chorus was). The rest came by itself, with Justine Mattera’s voice being picked up in a very natural way without her singing on the base, in a demonic speech and an explosive ending where Alexander’s voice shouts the epilog of revenge.

A look at your creative process, please, digital or analog?

Alessandro: The creative process, for us, cannot be digital. Digital is uniquely a means by which you realize creativity. It is clear that melodic lines and harmonies always start from our heads, from our hands on the instruments and it could not be otherwise. Then digital has the great advantage of allowing us to make the idea usable quickly and effectively. It’s a bit like the 3D printer: very useful, but if you don’t imagine which object to create by itself, it won’t create anything. And anyway, compared to the 4-track we used in the 90s, there is certainly less rustle …

Are any of you involved in other bands or do you have any active side projects going on at this point?

Andrea: At the moment we are very focused on Recall Madame X, we are preparing the live show for next season and this is absorbing a lot of energy, so there is no room for more at the moment.

We conclude this interview with some of your favorite albums. Have you discovered something new lately that you would like to recommend to our readers?

Alessandro: Our favorite albums are ‘Force the Hand of Chance’ by Psychic TV, ‘Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret’ by Soft Cell, ‘You Must Be Certain of the Devil’ by Diamanda Galas. At the moment we like Italians Talk To Her, the Ukrainian duo The Glass Beads and very much the Berliners Aus who evoke the legendary X-Mal Deutschland!

Klemen Breznikar

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