From the arid depths of Puglia, in southern Italy, emerges The Apulian Blues Foundation, embodied by Giovanni Valentino (vocals and guitar), Marco Meledandri (bass and backing vocals), and Cosimo Armenio (drums). This trio defines their sound as “delta stoner,” a fusion of early 20th-century blues and the electric density inherited from Kyuss, Electric Wizard, and Blind Willie Johnson himself. Their spearhead is slide guitar, a powerful and syncopated drum sound, and an electrifying bass line with which they reinterpret the roots of an eternal genre in a raw, noisy, and profoundly spiritual way, now through the lens of contemporary stoner/doom.
Your album has a tone that's both spiritual and earthly. What ideas or emotions did you want to capture this time compared to your previous EP? ¿Last but not least, please introduce the rest of the band members, and how long ago have you guys been around playing bluesy stoner devil music?
First of all, thank you for your interest in our project. In this last work we tried to experiment with lower tuning and down tempos so we feel that this new Full Length has a darker atmosphere than our previous EP. We recorded our first Ep in 2015 and since than a lot of line up changes have occured, so a change from our previous sound was a natural option. The current line up is made up of Johnny (slide guitar and vocals), Marco (bass and vocals) and Cipo (drums and vocals).
Your music has echoes of classic blues, but also a very Mediterranean sensibility. How do you manage to balance these seemingly disparate roots?
Actually we feel these roots are not so distant at all! Apulia is a land of earth and sea, that looks to the east of the world and is one of the first rocks in front of that huge continent that is Africa, the land where the very roots of blues and humanity itself began. So we think our Mediterranean sensibility is inbreed with the meeting of different cultures and generes.
Italy isn't the first country that comes to mind when talking about blues and stoner rock. What challenges and advantages have you encountered in developing your own voice within the genre?
Well, you wouldn't believe it, but Italy has a pretty big and pretty good stoner rock underground scene that started in the 90s. And the blues in all of its form is a genre very represented in lots of music festivals and venues in all our peninsula and embraced by a lot of artists here. But we had the idea of mixing together the delta blues, maybe the most rural kind of this music, and stoner rock, as we interpreted this union as representative of Apulia itself, which is very rural based but being a very desertic land at the same time. It was actually a very spontaneous process after all.
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What is the song "Cool Drink of Water" about? How did you manage to divide it into two parts? The first has a more southern sound, and the second is a direct punch to the gut with a lot of Stoner Doom.
This song is in some way inspired by a 1928 blues song by Tommy Johnson, who was a great bluesman and an alcoholic. We tried to give the song the feeling of "being addicted to something". So we had a frenzy and frantic part and and a slow, unrelenting part and we were figuring out how to connect them. The solution we came up with is a suite of three songs, composed by "Cool Drink of Water part 1" as the frantic part, "Everybody Ought To Love Jesus" which is a song that talks about the impositions perpetrated by religious institution and introduces a darker atmosphere and "Cool drink of Water part 2" that is intended to be the relentless part.
The blues was born from pain and resistance. What does it mean today to "sing the blues" in a region like Apulia, far from the Mississippi Delta but with its own history and scars?
As said previously, we think the Blues, whose primordial form (musically speaking) was born in western Africa and then developed as a culture in the Mississippi Delta, is a genre where different cultures meet. As Italians we know very well that our heritage is the son of different cultures that met centuries ago and in the last century that same heritage is facing the ultimate melting pot of cultures which is globalization. With this in mind, we try to bring the same idea in our music: the echoes from a distant time meeting the brutality of our contemporary world. And in this journey we found today's word being not too different from the world of the early 1900. And maybe this is the exceptional strength of the Blues: it is applicable in different eras and different contexts without losing its nature. It's a feeling, way before being a musical genre, and using the words of Howlin' Wolf himself "We are talking about the life of human beings. How they live".
How do you manage the balance between the spontaneity of the jam session and the conceptual structure that seems to underpin each song from Traditional Songs About Life, Death and Rebirth?
Every song of the album was born with a different concept in mind for each song. Starting from there, we jam to find the best way to express that concept in music until we found what we were looking for, and only then we crystallize the structure in its final form. So the jam part is very important and needed to develop the concept.
In times when everything is consumed quickly, how do you see the role of the complete album as a work of art, compared to the fragmented consumption of songs on streaming services?
Frankly we firmly believe in the idea of an album intended to be a work of art by itself and we are not very keen with the fragmentation of the music industry nowadays. To put out a full album in this era may seem to be in contrast with today's tendencies, but as artists and as musicians we think it is our responsibility to go countercurrent and deliver our message without compromise. We give our music to the people in the way we intend to, and then the people will decide what to do about it. After all, we are not doing this for money or fame. We are doing this for love.
What would you say to a young musician who discovers your band and decides to follow the path of blues and stoner doom from a remote corner of the world?
We will say this: study the genres intensively and respect them, but don't be afraid to dare and to experiment with different expressions. Music is a universal language, now more than ever, and there are no borders or frontieres to be kept in. That feeling of estrangement and alienation, that leads to the blues music, and to doom as well, is the same everywhere. It's just the Blues. And it doesn't really matter where you come from, when you have the Blues.
Is the song Mississippi Bowel Blues inspired by a true story or fiction? And to close with something more personal: if you could invite any musician, living or dead, to play with you guys one night in Apulia, who would you choose and why? Would Robert Johnson be a candidate?
Our song is inspired by a very old song of the African-American tradition, that talked about a pest who destroyed the crops, causing famine and starvation. In 1929 Charlie Patton, the godfather of delta blues, recorded a rendition of this song, but used the pest as a rhetorical device, denouncing the iniquity, the exploitation of the underprivileged and the consequent "sense of impending doom", if you let us say so, during the great depression. We were very fascinated by this concept. And about the final question, of course Robert Johnson would be a great candidate! Anyway, your question reminded me of a chat I had a long time ago with a friend, when the concept behind The Apulian Blues Foundation was still in development. We asked ourselves "what would happen if Blind Willie Johnson and the Electric Wizard could ever meet somehow, somewhere?" And maybe that was the spark that made The Apulian Blues Foundation happen. That contrast between a heavenly search for salvation by a poor man, made blind by his own mother in law, and the awareness that there is no salvation to be found at all, that we are all doomed. So if I could ever pick anyone in history it would be them, because I'm still looking after the result of this heavenly/infernal meeting.
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