La Neve Interview: Trying to Slow Down History
Photo by Alycia Kravitz
BY JORDAN MAINZER
Any project from Providence-based musician, historian, and activist Joey La Neve DeFrancesco begins in their roots in organizing. The popular punk band Downtown Boys started when DeFrancesco met lead vocalist Victoria Ruiz while working at the Renaissance Hotel in Providence, the two becoming involved with a hotel worker’s union. While their project La Neve is far more dance-oriented than Downtown Boys or even DeFrancesco’s electronic project with Ruiz, Malportado Kids, it’s still very political. And on La Neve’s new EP History Solved, DeFrancesco explicitly connects the dance floor to the streets. With drummer Karna Ray, DeFrancesco explores a punk ethos, an aesthetic of distorted, shouted vocals and industrial new wave beats. Opener “Soft Power” combines swirling synths with calls to “multiply” and “emasculate”, stripping the patriarchy of its power. The title track takes on the interconnectedness of global catastrophes--from the evils of capitalism DeFrancesco has spent their life fighting to the global pandemic that’s upended the lives of countless musicians--with a loud-quiet-loud industrialism. “Rough Music” rides clattering drums, washy noise, and limber bass to an 80s-esque rave up; the title refers to a classic form of street protest against a local political figure, often using lots of percussion, something akin to DeFrancesco’s time in brass band What Cheer? Brigade.
Knowing they wanted to blend live percussion with digital elements on the new La Neve material, DeFrancesco reached out to Marco Buccelli, the drummer for Xenia Rubinos, who had played with Downtown Boys. Ray had also worked with Buccelli and recommended him, and DeFrancesco was especially impressed with Buccelli’s work on Rubinos’ most recent album Una Rosa. Though the seeds of History Solved’s title track were planted pre-pandemic, DeFrancesco wrote most of the EP during the pandemic and recorded it with Buccelli in upstate New York last summer. Listening to it in all of its rawness, it’s clear DeFrancesco yearned for the live performance of these songs. La Neve played AS220′s Black Box Theatre in Providence in March; they describe their show as part drag, part mosh pit, and part rave. They’re also doing a release show for History Solved at Trans-Pecos in New York on May 7th.
I spoke with DeFrancesco over the phone last month about History Solved, rough music, their involvement in various labor movements, and working with mastering extraordinaire Heba Kadry. Read our conversation below, edited for length and clarity.
Since I Left You: What makes History Solved unique as compared to past La Neve releases?
Joey La Neve DeFrancesco: It’s definitely more intense and chaotic and punk. Coming from Downtown Boys, with La Neve, at first, I was trying to do more of a dance or house thing. I still do some of that on this record and still like playing that live. But this is much more transparently angry and aggressive and cathartic, coming out of a pandemic mindset. Some of it was coming out of visualizing what the music would be doing to people in a live context. Some of the most fun parts of doing this job are performing live, and for those couple years [during COVID], it was unthinkable how you could have a packed sweaty dance situation. I wanted to make something to capture those particular emotions and politics. It’s much faster, much more in this digital punk vein. Closer to Downtown Boys than the last record I did.
SILY: Did you have the album title or the title track first?
JLND: I don’t think I came at it thinking what the title of the record was gonna be. I think I wrote that song first or began working on it first. It felt like the last couple years, the way people had observed how time had been feeling, it felt like we were living in an accelerated experience of history and of things around us. It felt difficult to feel like we had much agency as a collective to slow down or influence these machinations of history around us. It felt like a particularly meaningful time, and I came up with it before the pandemic. It’s a line from Marx in the literal sense, but I took it to mean something different. I also like how the line sounds aesthetically. It seemed to fit what I felt was going on around me pretty accurately.
SILY: Do you think the idea of “Rough Music” is a good descriptor of this album in general?
JLND: [laughs] Yeah, it’s definitely rougher [than past La Neve material]. I’ve worked in museums and writing history as another one of my jobs for a while, so I have these nerdy historical references in a lot of my songs. Marx isn’t that nerdy of a reference, it’s more popular. But “rough music” is an old labor thing referring to working class parades where they would play music and mock a boss or someone with a lot of power in the community. So it works as a double meaning in the song, trying to mock that class of people, but the literal aesthetic of it is a little broken, punk, loud, messy, and sloppy in a lot of places.
SILY: Obviously it relates to your personal history in labor movements, too.
JLND: I met Victoria because we were working at the same hotel and had become involved with UNITE HERE!, a hotel workers’ union, which is what the band came out of. I worked with other labor campaigns to organize independent musicians into the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers, which put together the biggest collective campaign against streaming services that’s out there. It’s definitely how I see the world and how I think is the best shot at changing things, from a labor perspective. I think about it especially as a musician. You organize where you work, and musicians are not especially organized. For me, it’s to get some of the messaging into the music but also organize as a music worker within the industry itself.
SILY: A lot of the recent anti-Spotify conversations have centered around their allowance of...certain anti-vaccination podcasts. As someone who fights streaming services from a different angle, do you think that distracts from the conversation?
JLND: I think if people want to do that and can do that, it’s fine. It’s gotten a lot of attention to the issue and brought a lot of people into our organizing campaign. But I don’t think it’s sufficient to actually change things and get to a level we can build power as music workers and organize collectively to put pressure on Spotify in a mass organized way, if we’re really gonna influence anything. Spotify has essentially a monopoly power. Streaming is 83-90% of profits in the music industry, and Spotify controls about 40% of that. It’s like what Amazon had in retail a few years ago. The only way you confront a level of monopoly and power like that is to collectively get organized to put pressure on the industry. The last big effective national musician’s strike was in the 1940′s and had 150,000 musicians in the American Federation of Musicians and went on strike for 2 years to win some concessions from the recording industry. We’re far away from being that organized today, but we can get there. It’s possible to do. That’s what our campaign is about. Building power to where we can force concessions from these companies.
SILY: Changing gears: Aesthetically, “Precious Gem”, the final track on the EP, seems like a bit more of an outlier. What’s the story behind that song?
JLND: That was written a bit earlier than the other stuff. We debated whether to include it on the EP because, like you said, it’s not quite a mesh to the rest of it. But I still wanted to put it at the end because I love dance music and dancing. It’s what brings people together at the shows. Even though it’s different stylistically, working with Marco, we did a cool job blending the digital and live music elements. There’s still a lot of weird stuff we managed to fit in there sonically and rhythmically. We wanted a closer at the end that was a slightly different style. The project has been morphing stylistically pretty rapidly; it’ll probably never stay in the same place, even on the same record.
SILY: Was this your first time working with Heba Kadry?
JLND: Yeah! I’ve come to know her over the past couple years because she’s been quite involved in the musician union efforts. We had a conversation that was recorded with Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib. She’s amazing and has worked with a lot of incredible artists and is politically really aligned with everything we’re doing. So it was very exciting she wanted to do the record. Everyone on the record has been involved in the musician union stuff, actually. It’s been really cool to work with people who are politically aligned.
SILY: I feel like I see her name on every single record’s credits.
JLND: Yes. She’s a powerhouse and very busy and has very good taste in who she wants to work with. I’m honored she agreed to do the project with us.
SILY: How did your show at the Black Box go?
JLND: It was great. I got to play with Abdu Ali, this Baltimore club legend who Downtown Boys and me and Victoria’s other electronic band Malportado Kids had played with in Baltimore. We’ve brought Abdu up here and have been on the circuit with Abdu Ali for 7-8 years. I hadn’t seen them since the pandemic, so it was really exciting as a fan to see Abdu perform because they’re one of the best performers in the game. It was cool to get in there and have people dancing face to face with me. It felt a little bit rusty in terms of approaching the performance. Some of it’s like riding a bike, and some of it takes a certain level of practice. It’s still gonna be weird for a long time, but it’ll be exciting to be able to do it again.
SILY: Have you been to many other shows?
JLND: I went to see Mdou Moctar last month at the Columbus Theatre in Providence. I had never seen them live but had watched a lot of videos of them live, and it seems like they keep getting better and better as a live band. That was really inspiring. I’ve also seen some little shows here and there and been to the club when it seemed like COVID was behind us for a month or two. But Mdou Moctar was the time I felt again, “Wow! This is the power of live music.”
SILY: Did you play music from the EP at the Black Box?
JLND: Yeah, most of [it]. The only one I haven’t figured out how to do live is “Work to Rule” because it’s so heavily guitar-based and doesn’t do well with the backing track. I’d love to get to this point where the band can have more members in it, but it’s a difficult financial consideration to pay big bands of people. But overall people seemed to respond to [the EP].
SILY: What’s the story behind the cover art?
JLND: That’s a photo from the last La Neve tour we got to do right before COVID hit, in January of 2020. We did a West Coast tour and got to do a show in Reno at The Holland Project. I had never played in Reno before, but that was one of the most fun shows of the tour. There was a cool photographer there who took these double exposure shots of us throughout the night, named Rey Broughton. She had sent me a bunch of them. I said, “These are really amazing, I’d like to do something with them.” A couple years later, I had something for the image. It reminds me of getting to do that last tour and engaging with people in a place I had never been before.
SILY: Anything else next for you in the short or long term?
JLND: Hopefully some touring. Still chugging along writing music, so I’m hoping to write another set of things sometime soon. I feel like these days, it’s hard to think more than a few months in advance, especially in this industry. But the project continues. I’m continuing with the Union of Musicians and Allied Workers. We’re working with lawmakers on legislation right now to take on the streaming issue.
SILY: Anything you’ve been listening to, watching, or reading you’ve enjoyed?
JLND: I should be prepared for this question. I don’t want to just name all my friends.
SILY: You can!
JD: There’s an artist named Manchado in New York who just put out a new single. I’ve really liked their work for a while. They do this queer performance that’s strange and really pushing things. The song’s called “Mona Lisa”. There’s another band in New York I’m playing with on May 7th called Ratas En Zelo who I think are the best, most fun punk band in New York right now. In terms of reading, I do a lot of history work, so I’m always reading about 18th century history, especially in Rhode Island. There’s a really good book called The Black Carib Wars by Christopher Taylor, about people who lived in the island of St. Vincent who successfully repelled multiple attempts at invasion. Specifically, these events called the Black Carib Wars where the British were trying to invade the island of St. Vincent. They were amongst the last islands to successfully repel European influence for many years. It’s an event I didn’t know about so much, so finding stuff like that, that’s history that’s totally cut out of what we learned about, is cool.