Kitsunetsuki are a band from Treviso, Italy and make some of the best snarling dark post-punk music we’ve heard in a long time. Cat On The Wall’s Jo Whitby caught up with guitarist Marco via email to discuss the band’s latest single ‘Doll To Doll’ as well as their forthcoming debut album…
Cat On The Wall: For those of our readers who have yet to discover Kitsunetsuki, please tell us about yourselves! How did you all meet?
Marco: I’ve known Riccardo the drummer and Silvia the singer for 20 years. Me and Riccardo were in class together at Art School and we started playing in bands when we were just little kids. He had another band with Silvia singing and I joined, Kitsunetsuki is the evolution of that band. Lorenzo and Alessandro have recently joined, Alessandro was my classmate at Art School as well.
COTW: Why did you decide to call the band Kitsunetsuki?
Marco: We are all heavily interested in Japanese literature and culture, it literally means “the state of being possessed by a fox. The victim is always a young woman, whom the fox enters beneath her fingernails or through her breasts” (from Wikipedia). Silvia found it and we all liked it. There’s no special reason why we chose it, it just sounded nice. Actually the name was just Kitsune, we recently changed it to avoid confusions with the French label with the same name. I wish we’d done it earlier, I much prefer Kitsunetsuki.
COTW: Your debut single ‘Doll To Doll’ was released on the 6th, what has been the reaction so far? Was there a specific kind of meaning you wanted to portray with the song?
Marco: I’m doing this interview the week of the release, so I suppose it’s a bit early to know how it will go… it’s a particularly noisy and heavy song. Chris from our label EightK72 Records contacted us through MySpace because he loved the song so much he wanted to release it! Silvia wrote the words, it is inspired by a friend of ours who generally gets very drunk, goes to clubs and embarrassingly tries to approach girls; it’s about that lust for sex, the hopelessness and desperation of it.
COTW: What is your creative process as a band when composing songs?
Marco: We don’t have a method really. Songs just come out playing in rehearsals. Of course sometimes someone arrives with an idea but most of our songs came out just like that, unexpected. We wrote Vapid, which is going to be the next single, in 2 hours! I still have the recordings of that afternoon and it’s basically the same song we recorded for the album, just much slower. Usually the songs that come out very fast are the ones that I prefer.
COTW: There is word of an album? Can you tell us anything about this? What can fans expect?
Marco: Yes we have recorded an album, it took ages to finish but I’m proud of the results. It’s really, really varied. We are just not capable of always writing the same kind of song like other bands seem to do, I don’t know how they don’t get bored. I managed to get in contact with Dave M. Allen who was producer for The Cure for their best selling albums and asked him to mix a couple of songs for us, and with my surprise he accepted. I’m a huge Cure fan and the records he did with them were and still are a huge influence on me, so it really was an honour and a bit of a dream come true. The album will be released by UK label EightK72 Records in October/November of this year.
COTW: What do you enjoy most about performing live? Will there be a Kitsunetsuki tour soon?
Marco: I admit it’s a great feeling when you’re playing live and people understand and like what you’re doing. That’s it really, you spend time writing and recording songs and of course you just think about creating something that YOU will like first of all, but in the end when you’re playing your songs to people and they respond to it, well that’s the best feeling. We’re waiting to have the first live dates in the UK decided, we just can’t wait. We’re totally influenced by English music so to come to play in the UK is the biggest dream coming true. At first it’s just going to be a few dates I think, then hopefully next year we’ll organize a longer tour. We have the feeling that in the UK people will finally understand the kind of music we make, unlike in Italy where it’s really hard for a band like ours.
COTW: Finally, what are your plans for the near future?
Marco: We’re writing new songs for a future new album. Of course it’s really early now as our debut album is still to come out, but we want to make an even better record next time and we want to have loads of songs to choose from. We want to play live a lot and we’re really looking forward for future gigs.
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