Garden Wall

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Alessandro Seravalle started GARDEN WALL's journey at the end of the Eighties. Through the usual line-up changes, the band realized its first demo-tape, simply titled ''Garden Wall'', in 1992. The following year the German producer Peter Wustmann, well-impressed by the tape, decided to offer GARDEN WALL the chance to sign for his independent label WMMS. So in May 1993 the band was in Stuttgart to record its debut CD ''Principium'', seven tracks spanning between modern symphonic prog and heavy prog. The album met the interest and strong approval of the specialized press. Eight albums followed.

I got in touch with the band and here is their story.
#################################################################################

Your
biography has been covered in your ProgArchives profile so let's
bypass the biography details. But which bands were you influenced by
and why did you choose that name ?

As
you can imagine Garden Wall was chosen as a sort of tribute to
Genesis which was and still is my favourite band,
together with acts like Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Gentle
Giant and the Italian band Area. So... classic progressive-rock. That
said, Garden Wall don't sound as a typical progressive-rock band for
the simple reason that we never wanted to betray the original idea of
those great bands which has a lot to do with musical research,
building a personal sound (all the bands I quoted were very different
from each other) and the contamination between different musical
genres. The curious thing is that everybody in the band has a
completely different musical background: Raffaello is a metalhead,
his favourite acts are Metallica, Pantera (I adore them too), Slayer
and stuff like that, something my brother Gianpietro (who's more in a
“pop” vein) simply hates. William, the bass player, is a huge fan
of Adult Oriented Rock (Toto, Boston, Journey, Def Leppard) and
new-prog stuff like Marillion (again...I adore them too), Iq or
Pendragon. Ivan goes crazy for some prog-metal bands like Opeth,
Fates Warning or Dream Theater. I'm likely to be the most omnivorous
as far as, beside the bands I quoted before, I'm a follower of
avant-jazz, electronic music , metal (Tool, Death, Queensryche) and
twentieth century academical stuff. All those influences melt into
something I'd call a personal sound... Garden Wall sound is quite
peculiar!

This
is an archive based interview also intended for the fans you get well
after both you and I have passed away so let's go straight to your
releases. Please give us your views/some words on your releases,
starting with.......

Principium
from 1993

Well...
our first release. It's something special for that. Surely we were in
a symphonic progressive rock vein at that time, but we were already
searching for something personal, just think about the suite
“Ekpyrosis” and it's whole tone scale based harmonies. One could
tag it as new-prog because some Marillion influences were traceable,
but there really was more than that. The psychedelic approach of “
Onde Radio”, the epicness of “The Giant and the Wise-man”, the
soft and melancholic flavour of “Silent waves in a raging ocean”,
the majestic organ of “Wehwalt”... a very heterogeneous album.

Path
of Dreams from 1994

This
album is to be considered our
strongest effort in the realm of symphonic prog-rock and a  fair
success as well (some fans still consider it our best release). After
releasing “Principium” we focused more. Some of those songs
remained live favourites for a long time, like “Oniros” (we still
play it live), “Kaos”, “Sex”. It was our first concept album
as well, Eros and Thanatos seen through the distorting lens of the
oniric experience. The last album with my german friend Thomas
Schaufler on drums.

The
Seduction Of Madness from 1995

This
was
the first album recorded with Camillo Colleluori on drums. He brought
his “parossistic drumming” as a new element in our sound. I
started to compose more riffs using the pitch shifter pedal and the
sound we obtained was actually pretty new. Some early fans were a bit
dissapointed  but we never stopped and always tried to look for new
musical solutions. I think some of those songs (“Horizon of the
events”, “Taenia” and “W8less” are still in our liveset)
still remain among our more interesting ones in terms of riffing.

Chimica
from 1997

I
think this is our most “earth-soiled” album. It's probably
the closest thing to progressive-metal we did. It's dominated by the
34 minutes long suite “Chemotaxis”, surely a big compositional
effort. But, anyway, I wouldn't call “Chimica” a prog-metal
album. I mean, it's quite far from Dream Theater clones stuff!
There's room for experimental pieces (“Psychic infrared”, “Immer
Unterwegs”), darkish romantic tunes (“La belle dame”, “Immune”,
“No more”) and divertissements (“Dave in the swimming pool”).
I guess William could say something more as long as he loved this
album a lot when he wasn't in the band!

Forget
the Colours from 2002

The
first chapter of a trilogy and our most
claustrophobic album! Mauro Olivo, the keyboard player I worked with
since Principium, left the band and we replaced him with the guitar
wizard Raffaello Indri. The sound got heavier and we started dealing
with extreme-metal as well... I still consider ”Lead”, the
opener, as one of the best songs I wrote. No room for hope here! The
sound is tight, avant-gardistic, fierce and rageful! Just think about
songs like “Hatred” with its dark and gloomy atmospheres
featuring the violin, the desperate “Anniversary”, the grinding
“Bisturi” or the lightless “Deinococcus radiodurans”... the
album ends with “Dreams slayer” another Garden Wall favourite.

Towards
The Silence from 2004

Chapter
Two
of the trilogy. It's more direct if you compare it with its
predecessor, we decided to deal with more simple structures, the
songs are less complicated. It was a way for me to actually go
towards the silence. Still I think “Luna” is an amazing song, I
just love it. Other impressive songs are for me the opener “Caesura”
and the strange “Bottom” with its latin rhythms. The album is
more rhythmical and less harmonic so to say. We had serious human
troubles during the recording sessions and for a while we thought it
was over for Garden Wall... Fortunately it was not the end, but just
a crisis pushing me and the band towards new directions.

Aliena(c)tion
from 2008

This
album was recorded in 2000 (before Forget the colours) but we decided
to delay its release because we wanted to carry on with the trilogy.
When things stopped for a while we thought the time had come to
release it. It contains two seminal tunes (mainly for their
rhythmical aspects and for the aggressive sound) entitled
“Patogenesi” and “Ohne Zuckerzusatz”, a ballad (“Song
for an angel”) and some live tracks from our noise-metal era.

and
your brand new album Assurdo

Finally
Chapter Three.
Everything changed, Camillo Colleluori left after 12 years of playing
together... the sound dramatically evolved thanks to the structural
use of electronics. “Assurdo” sounds like no other, it's really
our most original album to date. We just wanted to melt into some
kind of “absurd” cauldron as many musical influences as possible.
Classic progressive-rock, twentieth century academical music, jazz,
ethnic music, electronica, hard-rock have been injected into a
strange particle accelerator and you can now hear the result of such
experimentation. It's not stuff for people in search for reassurance!
It's challenging, it's new, it's something all of us are really proud
of. Every song follows each other with no solution of continuity,
it's an hour long stream of music. We had a lot of guest musicians,
coming from musical areas quite far from ours, playing flute, cello,
violin, vibraphone, synths, various percussions, bass clarinet etc.
The interaction between our music and those very talented musicians
was something really exciting. “Assurdo” is a multi-layered work,
a different mix would result in almost unrecognizible songs,
something new or unheard jumps out at every listen. It took very long
to record it and mix it but... it's been worth it! For the first time
we shot a videoclip that will be soon available on the net. It's more
like a short movie indeed (seven minutes long), inspired to the
filmmaker Simone Vrech by our song “Negative”. He wrote the
script and directed it, we played small parts on the video and some
of our guest musicians did some cameos as well. We would like to play
multimedia gigs, with video projections and we are working in that
direction too. There are tons of things on the go at the moment and
we're trying to push this album more than we ever did before. Check
out “Assurdo” guys!

I
understand you are not too happy about being branded as a progressive
metal band. For those of us unknown with your music; how would you
describe you music and which bands would you compare yourself with ?

I
know
there's the serious risk of sounding pretentious but... I compare
Garden Wall to no other band. Of course this is great from the
artistic point of view but it's a kind of malediction on the other
hand. Most rock listeners just want to be reassured by listening to
endless variations of the same musical stuff. Garden Wall don't bow
to this view. We look for our personal way to intend rock music
because we love rock music and we want it to evolve. Everybody, of
course, has his influences but repeating a clichè has nothing to do
with art and we must remember (I claim that because sometimes it
seems to me people tend to forget it) that music was, is and will
always be a form of art, not mere entertainment! I don't know how to
describe our music, what I can tell you is that everything we did and
do is absolutely sincere and we make no calculations on what people
might like or not. Music is self-therapy, music is a way to know
oneself, it's a kind of ladder.

How
is the creative processes in your band from coming up with an idea to
it's being recorded?

I
usually write down the song on my own, then I make a pre-production
on the computer so the other guys can listen to this kind of
skeleton. At this early stage the composition already assumes an
almost definitive structure. Then there's the arranging phase in
which all the musicians involved put their sensibility and skills to
“dress” the skeleton to its ultimate form. Phase three is the
recording. Sometimes some solutions can jump out at that last stage
of the process. Surely my voice does
so. All the vocal lines are completely improvised in the studio, the
only predetermined stuff are the lyrics. I'm a very prolific song
writer, I'll never be able to record all the things I wrote (I guess
I recorded not more than the 20% of the music I actually composed)
and that's something which disappoints me. The problem is... time!
The problem is always time.

What
is your plans for the coming months and year ?

As
I said we're doing our best to promote the album, we're waiting for
the video post-production and we're planning as many gigs as possible
(but here in Italy the situation is really awful...
it seems only cover bands can find a stage to play on!). The material
for the next album already went through phase one. All the songs have
been written and pre-produced, next move is to arrange them and to
decide when to go to the studio to record our ninth album which will
be entitled “Psicomachie” (something I could translate with
“battles of souls” or “battles of minds”... I prefer the
first translation). Anyway, if anybody wanted to be informed about
Garden Wall activities, or simply stay in touch with the band, please
find us on Facebook, Myspace or ReverbNation!

To
wrap up this interview, is there anything you want to add to this
interview ?

First
of all a huge “Thank
You!” to all of you at Progarchives (I saw some very good reviews
of “Assurdo”!) for the chance you gave me to write about Garden
Wall. And thanks to all the PA community for its amazing work as a
precious source of informations about past and present prog-related
artists from all over the world. Second: please, all of you readers,
look for sincere music, look for interesting and new stuff. There are
tons of great bands out there waiting to be discovered (Lizard
Records catalogue is just fantastic for example). No more Dream
Theater clones! No more Genesis cheap imitations! No
more late Pink Floyd rough copies! Stop it!

Thank you to Garden Wall for this interview

Their PA profile is here and their homepage is here

Author	Message Topic Search Topic Options Post Reply Create New Topic Printable Version Translate Topic
toroddfuglesteg Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Retired Joined: March 04 2008 Location: Retirement Home Status: Offline Points: 3658	Topic: Garden Wall Posted: November 28 2011 at 12:19
	Alessandro Seravalle started GARDEN WALL's journey at the end of the Eighties. Through the usual line-up changes, the band realized its first demo-tape, simply titled ''Garden Wall'', in 1992. The following year the German producer Peter Wustmann, well-impressed by the tape, decided to offer GARDEN WALL the chance to sign for his independent label WMMS. So in May 1993 the band was in Stuttgart to record its debut CD ''Principium'', seven tracks spanning between modern symphonic prog and heavy prog. The album met the interest and strong approval of the specialized press. Eight albums followed. I got in touch with the band and here is their story. ################################################################################# Your biography has been covered in your ProgArchives profile so let's bypass the biography details. But which bands were you influenced by and why did you choose that name ? As you can imagine Garden Wall was chosen as a sort of tribute to Genesis which was and still is my favourite band, together with acts like Van Der Graaf Generator, King Crimson, Gentle Giant and the Italian band Area. So... classic progressive-rock. That said, Garden Wall don't sound as a typical progressive-rock band for the simple reason that we never wanted to betray the original idea of those great bands which has a lot to do with musical research, building a personal sound (all the bands I quoted were very different from each other) and the contamination between different musical genres. The curious thing is that everybody in the band has a completely different musical background: Raffaello is a metalhead, his favourite acts are Metallica, Pantera (I adore them too), Slayer and stuff like that, something my brother Gianpietro (who's more in a “pop” vein) simply hates. William, the bass player, is a huge fan of Adult Oriented Rock (Toto, Boston, Journey, Def Leppard) and new-prog stuff like Marillion (again...I adore them too), Iq or Pendragon. Ivan goes crazy for some prog-metal bands like Opeth, Fates Warning or Dream Theater. I'm likely to be the most omnivorous as far as, beside the bands I quoted before, I'm a follower of avant-jazz, electronic music , metal (Tool, Death, Queensryche) and twentieth century academical stuff. All those influences melt into something I'd call a personal sound... Garden Wall sound is quite peculiar! This is an archive based interview also intended for the fans you get well after both you and I have passed away so let's go straight to your releases. Please give us your views/some words on your releases, starting with....... Principium from 1993 Well... our first release. It's something special for that. Surely we were in a symphonic progressive rock vein at that time, but we were already searching for something personal, just think about the suite “Ekpyrosis” and it's whole tone scale based harmonies. One could tag it as new-prog because some Marillion influences were traceable, but there really was more than that. The psychedelic approach of “ Onde Radio”, the epicness of “The Giant and the Wise-man”, the soft and melancholic flavour of “Silent waves in a raging ocean”, the majestic organ of “Wehwalt”... a very heterogeneous album. Path of Dreams from 1994 This album is to be considered our strongest effort in the realm of symphonic prog-rock and a fair success as well (some fans still consider it our best release). After releasing “Principium” we focused more. Some of those songs remained live favourites for a long time, like “Oniros” (we still play it live), “Kaos”, “Sex”. It was our first concept album as well, Eros and Thanatos seen through the distorting lens of the oniric experience. The last album with my german friend Thomas Schaufler on drums. The Seduction Of Madness from 1995 This was the first album recorded with Camillo Colleluori on drums. He brought his “parossistic drumming” as a new element in our sound. I started to compose more riffs using the pitch shifter pedal and the sound we obtained was actually pretty new. Some early fans were a bit dissapointed but we never stopped and always tried to look for new musical solutions. I think some of those songs (“Horizon of the events”, “Taenia” and “W8less” are still in our liveset) still remain among our more interesting ones in terms of riffing. Chimica from 1997 I think this is our most “earth-soiled” album. It's probably the closest thing to progressive-metal we did. It's dominated by the 34 minutes long suite “Chemotaxis”, surely a big compositional effort. But, anyway, I wouldn't call “Chimica” a prog-metal album. I mean, it's quite far from Dream Theater clones stuff! There's room for experimental pieces (“Psychic infrared”, “Immer Unterwegs”), darkish romantic tunes (“La belle dame”, “Immune”, “No more”) and divertissements (“Dave in the swimming pool”). I guess William could say something more as long as he loved this album a lot when he wasn't in the band! Forget the Colours from 2002 The first chapter of a trilogy and our most claustrophobic album! Mauro Olivo, the keyboard player I worked with since Principium, left the band and we replaced him with the guitar wizard Raffaello Indri. The sound got heavier and we started dealing with extreme-metal as well... I still consider ”Lead”, the opener, as one of the best songs I wrote. No room for hope here! The sound is tight, avant-gardistic, fierce and rageful! Just think about songs like “Hatred” with its dark and gloomy atmospheres featuring the violin, the desperate “Anniversary”, the grinding “Bisturi” or the lightless “Deinococcus radiodurans”... the album ends with “Dreams slayer” another Garden Wall favourite. Towards The Silence from 2004 Chapter Two of the trilogy. It's more direct if you compare it with its predecessor, we decided to deal with more simple structures, the songs are less complicated. It was a way for me to actually go towards the silence. Still I think “Luna” is an amazing song, I just love it. Other impressive songs are for me the opener “Caesura” and the strange “Bottom” with its latin rhythms. The album is more rhythmical and less harmonic so to say. We had serious human troubles during the recording sessions and for a while we thought it was over for Garden Wall... Fortunately it was not the end, but just a crisis pushing me and the band towards new directions. Aliena(c)tion from 2008 This album was recorded in 2000 (before Forget the colours) but we decided to delay its release because we wanted to carry on with the trilogy. When things stopped for a while we thought the time had come to release it. It contains two seminal tunes (mainly for their rhythmical aspects and for the aggressive sound) entitled “Patogenesi” and “Ohne Zuckerzusatz”, a ballad (“Song for an angel”) and some live tracks from our noise-metal era. and your brand new album Assurdo Finally Chapter Three. Everything changed, Camillo Colleluori left after 12 years of playing together... the sound dramatically evolved thanks to the structural use of electronics. “Assurdo” sounds like no other, it's really our most original album to date. We just wanted to melt into some kind of “absurd” cauldron as many musical influences as possible. Classic progressive-rock, twentieth century academical music, jazz, ethnic music, electronica, hard-rock have been injected into a strange particle accelerator and you can now hear the result of such experimentation. It's not stuff for people in search for reassurance! It's challenging, it's new, it's something all of us are really proud of. Every song follows each other with no solution of continuity, it's an hour long stream of music. We had a lot of guest musicians, coming from musical areas quite far from ours, playing flute, cello, violin, vibraphone, synths, various percussions, bass clarinet etc. The interaction between our music and those very talented musicians was something really exciting. “Assurdo” is a multi-layered work, a different mix would result in almost unrecognizible songs, something new or unheard jumps out at every listen. It took very long to record it and mix it but... it's been worth it! For the first time we shot a videoclip that will be soon available on the net. It's more like a short movie indeed (seven minutes long), inspired to the filmmaker Simone Vrech by our song “Negative”. He wrote the script and directed it, we played small parts on the video and some of our guest musicians did some cameos as well. We would like to play multimedia gigs, with video projections and we are working in that direction too. There are tons of things on the go at the moment and we're trying to push this album more than we ever did before. Check out “Assurdo” guys! I understand you are not too happy about being branded as a progressive metal band. For those of us unknown with your music; how would you describe you music and which bands would you compare yourself with ? I know there's the serious risk of sounding pretentious but... I compare Garden Wall to no other band. Of course this is great from the artistic point of view but it's a kind of malediction on the other hand. Most rock listeners just want to be reassured by listening to endless variations of the same musical stuff. Garden Wall don't bow to this view. We look for our personal way to intend rock music because we love rock music and we want it to evolve. Everybody, of course, has his influences but repeating a clichè has nothing to do with art and we must remember (I claim that because sometimes it seems to me people tend to forget it) that music was, is and will always be a form of art, not mere entertainment! I don't know how to describe our music, what I can tell you is that everything we did and do is absolutely sincere and we make no calculations on what people might like or not. Music is self-therapy, music is a way to know oneself, it's a kind of ladder. How is the creative processes in your band from coming up with an idea to it's being recorded? I usually write down the song on my own, then I make a pre-production on the computer so the other guys can listen to this kind of skeleton. At this early stage the composition already assumes an almost definitive structure. Then there's the arranging phase in which all the musicians involved put their sensibility and skills to “dress” the skeleton to its ultimate form. Phase three is the recording. Sometimes some solutions can jump out at that last stage of the process. Surely my voice does so. All the vocal lines are completely improvised in the studio, the only predetermined stuff are the lyrics. I'm a very prolific song writer, I'll never be able to record all the things I wrote (I guess I recorded not more than the 20% of the music I actually composed) and that's something which disappoints me. The problem is... time! The problem is always time. What is your plans for the coming months and year ? As I said we're doing our best to promote the album, we're waiting for the video post-production and we're planning as many gigs as possible (but here in Italy the situation is really awful... it seems only cover bands can find a stage to play on!). The material for the next album already went through phase one. All the songs have been written and pre-produced, next move is to arrange them and to decide when to go to the studio to record our ninth album which will be entitled “Psicomachie” (something I could translate with “battles of souls” or “battles of minds”... I prefer the first translation). Anyway, if anybody wanted to be informed about Garden Wall activities, or simply stay in touch with the band, please find us on Facebook, Myspace or ReverbNation! To wrap up this interview, is there anything you want to add to this interview ? First of all a huge “Thank You!” to all of you at Progarchives (I saw some very good reviews of “Assurdo”!) for the chance you gave me to write about Garden Wall. And thanks to all the PA community for its amazing work as a precious source of informations about past and present prog-related artists from all over the world. Second: please, all of you readers, look for sincere music, look for interesting and new stuff. There are tons of great bands out there waiting to be discovered (Lizard Records catalogue is just fantastic for example). No more Dream Theater clones! No more Genesis cheap imitations! No more late Pink Floyd rough copies! Stop it! Thank you to Garden Wall for this interview Their PA profile is here and their homepage is here

TheGazzardian Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Prog Reviewer Joined: August 11 2009 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 8739	Posted: November 28 2011 at 13:36
	Assurdo really is a great album. An artist always wants to describe their work as highly original but really it's up to the listener whether or not they will get that feel ... I really did with Assurdo, and I definitely intend to look deeper into their back catalogue. Great interview, thanks Torodd and Alessandro!

memowakeman Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: May 19 2005 Location: Mexico City Status: Offline Points: 13032	Posted: November 28 2011 at 13:48
	What an excellent interview. Assurdo is a wonderful album!
	Follow me on twitter @memowakeman

Man With Hat Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Collaborator Jazz-Rock/Fusion/Canterbury Team Joined: March 12 2005 Location: Neurotica Status: Offline Points: 166183	Posted: November 29 2011 at 20:08
	Great read! I like the attitude he has in composing music and regarding music in general. And Assurdo is a pretty sweet album. I have a review of it coming shortly.
	Dig me...But don't...Bury me I'm running still, I shall until, one day, I hope that I'll arrive Warning: Listening to jazz excessively can cause a laxative effect.

The Truth Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: April 19 2009 Location: Kansas Status: Offline Points: 21795	Posted: November 29 2011 at 20:58
	I had no idea their discog was so large, I only have Assurdo but it it amazing. Great interview, torodd!


Mellotron Storm Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Prog Reviewer Joined: August 27 2006 Location: The Beach Status: Offline Points: 13586	Posted: November 29 2011 at 21:42
	Alessandro is so right when he says they are like no other band and he's right that they aren't Prog-Metal. These guys are so unique and creative and yes please check out their new album it's incredible !
	"The wind is slowly tearing her apart" "Sad Rain" ANEKDOTEN

zravkapt Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Special Collaborator Honorary Collaborator Joined: October 12 2010 Location: Canada Status: Offline Points: 6446	Posted: November 30 2011 at 00:52
	Great interview. Anyone who hasn't heard Assurdo yet needs to.

Wollax Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Joined: September 21 2011 Location: Italy Status: Offline Points: 22	Posted: February 17 2012 at 13:05
	Hey there, William from Garden Wall here. Our first official video is online, check it out!
	What doesn't kill you makes you a funny motherf**ker! (Henry Rollins)

infandous Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Senior Member Joined: March 23 2006 Location: United States Status: Offline Points: 2447	Posted: February 21 2012 at 10:14
	Just found this interview now. I have had the second and third album for years and love them, but for some reason never got around to getting anymore (so much great music, so little time and money I guess). Heard Assurdo recently and was blown away, definitely going to buy that one as soon as I can. So different from those early albums yet still obviously the same band (mostly thanks to Alessandro's singing). Anyway, great interview and great band!

rrsis Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Unwanted Spam Joined: March 13 2012 Location: london Status: Offline Points: 9	Posted: March 14 2012 at 22:29
	Hey there, William from Garden Wall here.

Wollax Members Profile Send Private Message Find Members Posts Add to Buddy List Reviewer page Forum Newbie Joined: September 21 2011 Location: Italy Status: Offline Points: 22	Posted: August 30 2012 at 15:56
	Finally some "Assurdo" stuff on YouTube! This is "Iperbole", live at Trieste Summer Rock Festival, Italy. Enjoy!
	What doesn't kill you makes you a funny motherf**ker! (Henry Rollins)