Proteo
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Category: Progressive Music Lounges
Forum Name: Interviews
Forum Description: Original interviews with Prog artists (which are exclusive to Prog Archives)
URL: http://www.progarchives.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=76270
Printed Date: December 20 2024 at 17:45
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Topic: Proteo
Posted By: toroddfuglesteg
Subject: Proteo
Date Posted: February 27 2011 at 13:03
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Proteo is a prog rock band hailing from Italy. The band began in 1996 playing mainstream rock, but soon became interested in playing in the more progressive arena and today describe themselves as a prog-pop band. The band was formed by Marco Paulica on rhythm guitars and vocals, Matteo Copetti on lead guitar and sax, Alessandro Surian on bass and Fabio Gorza on drums. The lineup has remained the same since the band's formation until the present day. I got in touch with the band and Matteo Copetti answered my questions. ############################################################################## When, where
and by whom was Proteo started ? Did any of you, past and present members, play
in any other bands before joining up in Proteo ? Why did you choose that name
?
Marco
Paulica (vocals and guitar) and Matteo Copetti (guitar) were teenagers and used
to play at a same local youth marching band, the idea of a rock band started to
take really place in 1994. The actual lineup, featuring Alessandro Surian (bass)
and Fabio Gorza (drums) was born and is the same since 1996, right when the band
started regular rehearsal sessions and the name, PROTEO, was chosen.
We chose
that name because the proteo is an animal that lives in some caves in our
territory. It lives deep, lonely in the ground, where water is almost pure, it
is amphibian, blind and delicate but also hard to die, it lives something like a
hundred years. We hope our band to be long living as its long lasting life and
our way of making music as pure as its purity and sensibility.
All of us came
from different musical backgrounds
and from different early bands, but we do not consider this a key feature of Proteo, as too often we read in
other bios around the web: it is quite normal for four guys to have different
tastes in music, it would
be rather rare to meet four people
with exactly the same tastes.
What comes out, if we mix the ideas
of these four people is simply unpredictable.
Beyond the differences that bring several moods in the
compositions, there is a hard work in rehearsal that really makes the difference
through the years.
Melting four musicians together gives not an automatic result, this is
the alchemy of our work, the random clue that makes our hours spent in rehearsal
never boring.
 Your only
album to this date was the Under A Polar Red Light album from 2009. Please tell
us more about this album.
Under a Red
Polar Light was intended as our 10th anniversary album: we started recording
it in 2006 to celebrate ten years of activity. Searching for an
artwork,
Marco saw an article in a scientific
journal in which they explained the effects of solar cycles on
our planet, one of which is precisely the formation of polar auroras in particular reddish
hue: we all decided to
put this aurora image as the album cover, to meet the solar cycle with the first ten years
of Poteo, intended as our “first cycle”.
In 2006 we
meant to celebrate in a “restricted way”: we didn’t imagine to really put our
compositions in a worldwide distributed CD. Luckily we got more involved in
music business after meeting Massimo Orlandini and signing for its label:
MaRaCash Records. We took much time to mix it the best way with the help of our
sound engineer Diego Pernich. At the end, took three years to complete
recording, mixing and releasing it. Thank to this dilated time, the record
features both older and newer compositions; some of the old ones took many years
to become like they’ve been recorded, passing through many revisions and changes
according to our way of playing and intending music in a certain period. Finally
we simply took the best of our production of the last ten and more years and got
them on a CD, the pieces are almost all intended into the prog direction, the
same direction that we took through the years. There may
be songs of the past just
as good but not related to
our today’s composing
way.
For those
of us unknown with your music; how would you describe you music and which bands
would you compare yourself with ?
We
believe
that our music is largely daughter of our
childhood years, a blend of the 80's where we mostly
grew up and the weight of the 70’s.
We
always intended and worked on the aspect that our music should be a compact
sound, we don’t like one instrument to overcome the others. The best way for us
to express with music is to compose and play songs that will release details to
the listener drop by drop, listening after listening. Each time one plays a
PROTEO song, we guess one should enjoy a new detail of our composition, picking
up an aspect well hidden inside harmony and melody, making the listening long
lasting and ever interesting.
That said, it is difficult for us to identify bands that can actually
inspire us, this should be up to listeners and employees of the press:
more or less they agree on our sound
influenced by pop/new wave music of the 80’s, most of the times they have
many different views when speaking
about our influences. That can only make us happy: it means that we are
not easy to label.
However, if we have
to name a few, we can say
that we had
a big influence by the Police, one
of the first groups from which we
have chosen the cover, on which we
created our groove and feeling just playing
around. We think the Police is a band that really marked a
turning point, played really original music, not only in terms
of sound but just from a
metric point of view. We make no
secret that some ideas
on the harmonization of our tracks are
directly inspired by the music of the
Police. What have
you been up to since 2009 and what is your latest update ?
Since the
publication of the CD,
we have faced, in cooperation
with our label, a double activity:
concerts and CD promotion: a path full of success culminated winning 2009 best debut prog album award at the prog event exhibition of independent labels in Faenza (MEI) and participating as opener at Veruno 2DaysProg festival
with Moongarden, Gazpacho and Pendragon.
We had
great times, especially in Veruno and we came back from there with an agreement
with a big management agency (Musicità): we hope this will take PROTEO in more
live stages around Italy and Europe. Our first gig in 2011 will be supporting Le
Orme at Miela Theater in our town, Trieste, in April 8th.
Like all
bands, we draw lifeblood from our live performances, so the goal is always to keep
this channel up and running.
Obviously we
never stopped composing songs and planning our next studio album: we are
actually building up some brand new, more complex
and challenging songs, surely
reflecting our
current musical trend. We do this taking care
to maintain our peculiarities, while improving the musical quality and the
lyrics aspect too.
To wrap up
this interview, is there anything you want to add to this interview
?
We wish
to thank once again Massimo Orlandini for having taken us in MaRaCash Records, because doing so, he really helped us in making a big step forward in our activity,
expanding our motivation
to make music and, above
all, gave us the
opportunity to bring our
music outside the usual borders that an unknown
band has got.
Last, we are so glad for this interview, thank you so much for your interest
in Proteo! Thank you to Matteo for this interview Their PA profile is http://www.progarchives.com/artist.asp?id=4892" rel="nofollow - and their homepage is http://www.proteorock.com/start.htm" rel="nofollow -
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Replies:
Posted By: Finnforest
Date Posted: February 27 2011 at 18:35
"Red Polar Light" is a very enjoyable album. Good stuff guys, keep it up
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Posted By: domizia
Date Posted: February 28 2011 at 04:23
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Thanks Torodd and Finnforest. For the US proggers: always remember that you can easily find Proteo and more great Italian prog at Greg Walker's http://synphonic.8m.com/" rel="nofollow - http://synphonic.8m.com/ . I hope this is not considered a wrong comment, I just wish to be of help because I know for a fact that many US prog listeners find it hard or expensive to buy from Europe. ------------- RPI=> http://www.camelotclubprog.net" rel="nofollow - Camelot Club Prog ...but also> http://www.maracash.com" rel="nofollow - MaRaCash records. |