{"id":738,"date":"2021-04-04T13:34:03","date_gmt":"2021-04-04T13:34:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ponderosa.it\/artist\/blonde-redhead\/"},"modified":"2025-05-22T13:33:25","modified_gmt":"2025-05-22T11:33:25","slug":"blonde-redhead","status":"publish","type":"artisti","link":"https:\/\/ponderosa.it\/en\/artist\/blonde-redhead\/","title":{"rendered":"Blonde Redhead"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Blonde Redhead<\/strong> was formed in New York in 1993 by the chance meeting between Japanese art student Kazu Makino<\/strong> and Maki Takahashi<\/strong> with Italian twins Simone<\/strong> and Amedeo Pace<\/strong>. With an extremely long career, the band never stopped experimenting, starting from the rock noise of their debut, through dream-pop and arriving at the electronic elements of their latest albums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Makino<\/strong> and Amedeo <\/strong>(guitars and vocals), Simone<\/strong> (drums), and Takahashi<\/strong> (bass) captured the attention of drummer Steve Shelley of Sonic Youth<\/strong>, thanks to their chaotic, and at the same time artistic, rock. Thanks to Shelley, Blonde Redhead<\/strong> published their first album: Blonde Redhead<\/em> (1994).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cLife changes fast,\u201d Joan Didion once wrote. \u201cLife changes in the instant. You sit down to dinner and life
as you know it ends.\u201d
In the spring of 2020, Blonde Redhead singer and multi-instrumentalist Kazu Makino encountered this passage from Didion\u2019s 2005 memoir of grief, The Year of Magical Thinking, in which the author reflected on the devastating experience of witnessing her husband\u2019s sudden death at the dinner table. Amid the profound uncertainty of those early pandemic months, Makino was thinking of her own parents far away in Japan; the then-lost ritual of congregating for dinner with family; and the heavy, omnipresent feeling that life could change in the instant for any of us.
With plainspoken language and incandescent melodies, Makino narrated these feelings on a pair of songs,
\u201cSit Down for Dinner Pt I\u201d and \u201cSit Down for Dinner Pt II,\u201d which helped title the tenth full-length from Blonde Redhead. \u201cSit Down to Dinner Pt II\u201d thematically transcends time: \u201cIt\u2019s sort of about death, but the music is so alive and groovy,\u201d Makino says. Yet, the title Sit Down for Dinner has a separate resonance for the Italian members of Blonde Redhead, the Milan-born twin brothers Amedeo Pace (singer \/ multi-instrumentalist) and Simone Pace (drummer). \u201cCulturally, dinner is important to us,\u201d Simone says of the nonnegotiable family ritual. \u201cIt\u2019s a moment for us to sit down and have time with each other.
We grew up that way. I know a lot of people eat and run, eat in front of their TV, or don\u2019t care about it too much\u2014and that\u2019s OK\u2014but we really do.\u201d Dinner has long been a sacred ritual for Blonde Redhead as a band as well; when they\u2019re on tour or rehearsing, they always share a meal, no matter what.

Owing to that sense of persistent togetherness, the immersive, meticulously-crafted Sit Down for Dinner is a testament to the unique internal logic Blonde Redhead have refined over their three-decade existence.
Formed in the 1993 New York indie underground, Blonde Redhead quickly found a place on Sonic Youth drummer Steve Shelley\u2019s label, Smells Like, before releasing beloved records on Touch & Go and 4AD that traced an arc from angular indie-rock to cosmopolitan art pop. The trio might have been a quintessential \u201990s band, if not for the fact that they continuously kept going, growing, never confined to any era but the present.

On Sit Down for Dinner, the understated yet visceral melodies charging each song create a foil to lyrics about the inescapable struggles of adulthood: communication breakdown in enduring relationships, wondering which way to turn, holding onto your dreams. Going into the record, Makino had recently spent time living on a tiny Italian island and pursuing solo music\u2014an experience that instilled in her new confidence to experiment and have fun. She returned to New York as the world was locking down, quarantining with Amedeo and his partner upstate, where they focused on the music in seclusion.
Immaculately structured, imbued with sensitivity, clarity, and resolve, Sit Down for Dinner was ultimately written and recorded over a five-year period spanning New York City, upstate, Milan and Tuscany.
The luminous groove and chord progression of \u201cSnowman,\u201d sung by Amedeo, is one of many Blonde Redhead songs inspired by the attitude and breeziness of Brazilian experimental music; a brilliant turn of phrase melts its titular snowman into simply a man, struggling to express himself: \u201cDo you feel alive or do you only fall? So like a no man, that you are.\u201d Makino wrote \u201cRest of Her Life\u201d as an elegy for her cherished late horse, Harry, who she considered \u201calmost like my soulmate\u201d (and whose loss in 2020 moved her to read The Year of Magical Thinking). The song\u2019s vocal layers were inspired by the Swingle Singers\u2019 a capella renditions of Bach.

The subtly brooding \u201cIf\u201d embodies the existential unease of middle age, struggling to orient oneself and locate where, and who, are home. The widescreen introspection of \u201cI Thought You Should Know\u201d confronts the experience of being misunderstood, or unheard, by those closest to you. On \u201cKiss Her Kiss Her,\u201d when Makino sings, \u201cEven stars are closer,\u201d the lyric references a short story in Khul-Khaal, by the Arabic writer Nayra Atiya, in which a woman hopes to divorce her husband, and is told \u201ceven the stars are closer\u201d than such a possibility. \u201cIt\u2019s about someone with a bold, entirely far-fetched dream, where you know it will end in tears, but you want to be supportive anyway.\u201d
Elsewhere, the songs of Sit Down for Dinner find ways forward in pure experimentation. \u201cMelody Experiment\u201d received its title when Makino \u201cunlocked the song with the melody\u201d in a moment of serendipity. \u201cI was singing a little bit off, in a bluesy way, and I was so fascinated,\u201d she says. \u201cIt feels quite new, like something I haven\u2019t done before.\u201d With its stacked backing vocals, \u201cBefore\u201d was written with children\u2019s voices in mind, narrated from the perspective of a kid who thinks they know it all.
\u201cChildren have incredible abilities,\u201d Makino says. \u201cThey have a confidence that is so whole, they can see through you a little.\u201d Amid the windswept melodies and arrestingly bittersweet tone of \u201cNot for Me,\u201d Amedeo gave himself the challenge of vulnerability, writing while Makino was in Italy, longing for that kind of freedom. \u201cYou ran with the flowers\/And further than water\/And further than our walls,\u201d he sings.
\u201cMove to the side, move to the light, move to a place that no one can find.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n


Releasing Sit Down for Dinner in its 30th year, Blonde Redhead\u2019s perseverance partially came in realizing that the process of making the record should necessarily be fun. \u201cUsually I agonize and it\u2019s painful for me to write music, but on this one, I didn\u2019t suffer as much,\u201d says Makino. \u201cI wanted to put my foot down and say: we can have a nice time together. The record sounds quite optimistic.\u201d Amedeo adds, \u201cWe do really respond to each other. We depend on each other for inspiration. Kazu completes what I start; Simone completes both with rhythm.\u201d

Perhaps this gives the title Sit Down for Dinner yet another layer, as the music, fittingly, is a pleasure, with the ease of new conversation among familiar friends. Crucial to that equation are Blonde Redhead\u2019s innate harmonic sensibilities, which Makino calls the core of the band. \u201cWe have a language we have kept,\u201d she adds. \u201cWe try to change rhythms, concepts, and sounds. But that harmonic sensibility has stayed the same. It hits the same part of your heart.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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