Englisch
Interview with Viviana from D.B.Reloaded (Da Blitz)
Our meeting with Viviana took place Saturday Dec. 3rd 2005. I would like to say a big thank you to Viviana for the great interview.
More information about Viviana go to: www.vivianb.eu/
WebDjs: How did your interest for music develope?
Viviana: I fell in love with music when I was 6 years old. My love started there. Out of the blue, I got the opportunity working in the music buis. In 1994 I went to Bliss Co. and then for 5, 6 years I worked as an artist. Then we went away from the label. I had to wait, until Simone became a Pharmacist, and then we started again, but we decided to do it another way. We know, what it means to be an artist, but we didn´t know what it means to be a producer. But we thought we could be able to do it. So we started this experiment due to our deep love in music : in 2004 we built PresstorePublishing. We are publishers, but we are very young, we have to improve our experience and so we decided to learn about “the other side of the music buisness”.
WebDjs: What profession did you learn?
Viviana: I started studying Piano when I was 6 years old until I was 16 and Simone also studied Piano for ten years.This gave us the foundation. We learned about Dance Music at Bliss Co. We are both Piano players.
WebDjs: Did you take singing lessons?
Viviana: I didn´t take any singing lessons. When you study Piano, you have to learn how to sing the notes and you train your hearing.
WebDjs: How did you get to the label Bliss Co. (Inprogress)?
Viviana: I had a band when I was 18 years old called “Miradodirado”. Then I changed to another band called “Valar”. We performed all around Torino and countries close to us. During a competition we won third prize. But I had to go to university and study, so I left the band. The drummer of Miradodirado Band told me that I shouldn’t stop singing!. He was a barman. Were he worked, Lobina would come and drink something. Lobina gave him a card from Bliss.Co. because they were looking for singers. When I left the band, the drummer gave me the card from Bliss.Co. After the success of “People have the Power”, they were looking for musicians and singers. I took the address and put it in one of my chemistry books that I was using for an exam at the university. I completely forgot about it. Then in September 1994 I opened that book and the address fell out. So I called them and they asked me to come by because they wanted to heard what my voice sounded like.They gave me an english text to see if my pronunciation in English was ok and then they asked me to sing. I sang “People have the Power” and they really liked my voice. Whitney Houston was one of the songs I chose to sing for them. After singing a few songs to them they took my voice and cut a passage of Whitney Houstons song and out of that Simone Pastore created “Let me be” in 1994. Albertino, at radio DJ, introduced the song. From that day on I made a living with music.
WebDjs: How was Da Blitz created?
Viviana: Da Blitz were me & Simone Pastore. Simon is the arranger and the main musician. The lyrics of the “rap” part were written by Jeffery Jay on Let Me Be-Take My Way and Stay With Me. Gabutti were the producer. Mimo Capuano co-worked with Simon to Let Me Be . From Take My Way till the end I wrote the lyrics and the melodic lines.
Gabry Ponte was our Dj.
WebDjs: How did you come up with the name „Da Blitz“? (Blitz is german and means lightning)
Viviana: That was not a idea of mine or Simone. It was a idea of Massimo Gabutti the producer. I don’t know how they got the idea, but Massimo Gabutti came to us and said that our name would be Da Blitz.
WebDjs: Did you know Simone before Da Blitz?
Viviana: No, I didn’t know him before. We met at Bliss Corporation, but we studied in the same street because I was a biologist and he was chemist and we took the same exams. In Torino there is a street called Via Pietro Giuria where both we had a laboratory for chemists and we both prepared for the same examination at the same place. But we never met each other before meeting at Blissco.
WebDjs: Who wrote most of the lyrics for the Da Blitz songs ?
Viviana: I wrote most of the lyrics for Da Blitz, except “Let me be”.
WebDjs: Where was your best performance/best audience, crowed?
Viviana: We perfomed in Italy, Spain (Valencia,Barcelona, Madrid), France(Paris), Switzerland, Germany, Slowenia and Croatia. We never performed in the UK. I performed as a vocalist in 1997 in Amsterdam. The best stage appearance was in Spain. The tour was organized from the label “Blanco y Negro”. I remember it was in the main street in Barcelona. It was full of people and it rained. They told us there were 40’000 people. It was amazing. I will never forget all these people in front of us singing our songs.
WebDjs: How many times did you perform in Switzerland?
Viviana: We performed in the Disco “Titanic”(Chiasso) about 4to5 times and in Zürich at the Disco”Oxa” in the year 1995 and 1996….and many other times: now as now I don’t remember the exact places.
WebDjs: Are the versions(live in San Juan, Portorico and Live in Bangkok from Movin’ on) real?
Viviana: Yeah ,I have to say they are real. Now people have to decide if they are going to believe or not……
WebDjs: How was it working together with Prezioso?
Viviana: Prezioso is a very funny person. He has very strange hair and hats. Everytime he came to the studio, we had fun. He’s always smiling. It was a pleasure to work with him. We made “Anybody anywhere” and “Don’t stop” at Blissco studios: these songs where arranged by Maurizio Lobina and I sang the songs. Prezioso enjoyed working with us, because we were very young and we worked together sharing happy moments. Maurizio Lobina did a great job with these two songs of Prezioso.
WebDjs: Why do you have someone else name on the cover of Preziosos’ single and not yourself?
Viviana: Daphnes was the artists name. If you listen to the voice, you can hear that it’s mine. Daphnes was my second artist name. But the intention was not to make people understand it was me…..
WebDjs: Who is the asian girl in the clips of Bliss Co. (inprogress)?
Viviana: In the clips we included all people of the studio: KAMARAK was the thai-girl that worked for at administration and Marilisa was the secretary of BlissCo. So everytime they made a video, they included everyone of us.
WebDjs: Did you like being in videoclips (making them)?
Viviana: Yes it was the thing I preferred and I have to be sincere. If a person likes to sing, he likes to perform too. Other people say ‘yeah, I’m famous but I don’t care about it’ that’s not true. A person who likes to sing, who likes to perform has most gratification when he can present himself. So it was very funny to present ourselves in different ways; with strange hair-make ups or different dress. It was like a baby girl playing. It was very funny, I felt like a child.
WebDjs: Why did you call Angelica Villella „Diabolika“?
Viviana: I don’t know why they said that, because Angelica was a very calm and quiet person, so I think they said „Diabolika“because it was quite the opposite of her. She was more an Angelica then „Diabolika“ anyway……
WebDjs: Why did you leave Bliss Co. (Inprogress)?
Viviana: The reasons are stricktly personal It wasn’t a problem working together.
Between friends can happen, that “personal” things get in the way.
What happened at Bliss Co taught me a big lesson: if people work together they don’t necessary need to talk about personal business, because sometimes personal business and working business don’t fit together. We all were good friends, twenty young people working together and we were too young to understand what kind of problems would face us. Obviously you have to go to work and do the best thing you can but, normally, after work you should have your private life, at Bliss Co I didn’t have it. And I missed it so much. After five years, the success of Da Blitz ended and I saw behaviours I didn’t like: when a friend is down you have to encourage him and say ‘don’t worry, tomorrow will be a better day’, not put him down and tell him that it’s over. That behaviors made me understand, that these people were not my friends.I’m an artist and I have to feel that the people I work with are my friends….or “near to me” or “like me”. If I don’t feel this feelings towards the persons I work with, I can’t write a lyric and I can’t sing a song because I’m not happy and so I can’t be productive. We couldn’t be friends anymore and so I decided to stop working there at Blissco.
WebDjs: What did you do after Bliss Co. (Inprogress)?
Viviana: I left Bliss Co in November 1997 and I took one year off doing nothing, because I needed to rest. So I stayed at home for one year and had a normal life like going to bed at ten o’clock not five in the morning. During that year I tried to rebuild my life. Then I met a young guitarist from Torino. He wanted to create a new band and he was looking for a singer, so he asked me if I would be the main voice in the band. I said yes, because I thought that sounded like a great idea. So we named the band INSOMNIA and we performed about five years in northern Italy. It was a huge band. We played songs from Pink, Aretha Franklin, Withney Housten and all seventies/eighties funk songs like the Blues Brothers. This kind of music I like MOST!!!!…..After five years of performing I said,” I can sing, but I love to write songs too” and I told myself that I should start writing again.
Then I met a piano player (and owner of a studio). I worked at his studio for one year. During that time I made eight tracks of an italian album. Then from 1998 to 1999 I went to Novara (1 hour from Torino) where I met 2 person who liked R n’B very much. So I worked there every Monday for one year and composed my own eight R n’B tracks. These R n’ B songs were never published in Italy. But one day, if Presstore ‘grows up’ , I will release them.
WebDjs: Can you discribe a day in your life?
Viviana: I wake up at eleven in the morning, then I have a shower and I put my make up on. Then I’m ready to open my notebook and I download the mails that came in. Then I spend most of my time looking in the net what people write about us(Presstore)or I try to find new sites where they talk about Italodance or I look for Labels that would be intereted in our productions. It’s very interesting for me to find out what kind of dancestyles other countries listen to, because in every country dancemusic is different. So I check out the dancecharts from some countries and see from what labels they are from and contact them to show them our productions from Presstore….maybe, I can sell a licence….!! :)
I also listen to dancemusic from other countries to see what’s popular at the moment to “fit” some of their styles in our new productions. Since 2003 Italy hasn’t really changed its dance style. I prefer to be inspired by other countries like Germany or France. In my opinion, dancemusic in other countries has really developed and it’s growing & changing. You can’t really see that in Italy.
WebDjs: What does your future look like?
Viviana: I can’t tell you what my future will be like, but I can tell you what I hope.
If I had to choose a profession, being a publisher is not exactly the work I would like to do, because I’m mainly an artist.
There is one thing I would like to do, and that is the same work that Remy does for Airplay Records in France. Remy is the art director of Airplay Records which is the dancelabel of Universal France. I think Remy’s work is the most interesting, because he has to listen to a lot of music and pick out the best tracks to see, what could become a potential hit. So my dream is, to travel to different countries to find good studios, production teams and new sounds….or potential HITS.
Once upon a time they called this job TALENT SCOUTING.
I would like to become an important art director or talent scout for a significant label. If Presstore doesn’t become an important label, my dream would be to work for Universal or Sony. That’s my dream!!
WebDjs: We say thank you for the interview and wish you a great future.
Viviana: I hope so and thanks to you guys……
