By Tutti DuPlenty / Photo Fabio Calabretta

Next Friday Dame Area release their fifth album in almost a decade of existence. “Toda la verdad sobre Dame Area” is a record that is palpably more ambitious than its predecessors, with an overwhelming sound, aimed at completely dispelling the suspicion that the magic of the Barcelona duo lies above all in their universally razing live performances. Acclaimed and sought after by the most reputable media and festivals in the world, Silva and Viktor make time to chat about their origins as a band, mystery, magic, dance music, and their new album.

‘Toda la verdad sobre Dame Area’ is out this Friday, September 13, and is already available for pre-sale. Its advance singles can be listened to on all platforms.

Despite being a band that is very present (in the sense that you are playing a lot, featured in media, etc.), very active on social media, and perfectly accessible personally, I feel you awake a certain sense of mystery. Am I losing my mind, or do you see it too?

Silvia: Really? Well, maybe because of coming from Màgia Roja… A space that no longer exists; if you haven’t been there you can’t go anymore. Maybe this happens more in Spain. I don’t know, what do you think?

Viktor: I don’t know. I’m not able to watch from the sidelines. There are some people, like Silvia says, who associate us with Màgia Roja or who know about that world, but that’s not a majority even in Spain. From time to time we meet someone who is super into it, and for those people it’s like ‘wow’.

But in that case that ‘wow’ could be more an admiration one, link ‘wow, these people have done all that’. I mean more like a perception of you being very strange people, who live in a very strange place, who you never know where they might be, who do secret things, who talk about hidden things all the time.

Viktor: Haha. Well, actually, we have done a lot of things that, looking back, are quite amazing or at least very peculiar. But there is also a part of, I suppose, fantasy, mixed with a part of truth. In the time of Màgia Roja there was much more of that stuff, because we were more in Barcelona, ​​in a community and all that. And the place itself gave rise to magical things that happened all the time and encouraged people to behave differently.

Silvia: I think there were people who did feel a bit like that about the place: ‘Is it a cult? Isn’t it a cult?’. Within that context I can see it, and we have played with that kind of thing.

Viktor: We played with that notion for our own entertainment, and then there were things that happened that… For example, a person rang on a weekday when we were closed and asked, ‘Is this a cult?’ and we said, ‘No, it’s a cultural association’. And he said, ‘If you’re a satanic cult, that would be fine with me’.

Satanic, specifically?

Viktor: We even appeared in a book about Satanism!

I wasn’t going crazy. OK.

Silvia: And some guy in a well-known conspiracy webzine wrote about Màgia Roja saying ‘in this building you can feel that the energy changes, I don’t want to know what’s going on in there’. And then on a map he linked the place with other places in the city and made a strange shape, I don’t know, a perfect triangle or something. And because of that some paranoid people showed up later.

Viktor: [Shows in his cellphone a photo of a page from the book ‘Yo, satanista’ on his phone]

[Reading out loud] ‘… its owners define themselves as an organization capable of promoting and disseminating music inspired by magic’. Of course, how could all this not give a sense of mystery.

Viktor: Well, a lot of things were done, some of them by our own and some other activities by making it easier for people to organize them. It was a lot of fun. It would take a long time to talk about them and some of them we cannot even talk about… it is better for people to do their own research. It is more entertaining.

Silvia: I think it’s something that could be more perceived in Spain, especially in Barcelona, ​​by people who have heard about Màgia Roja. There is a kind of mystery of ‘what was going on inside that place, what was it like.’ And we lived there. The group was born there, we recorded our first albums there… It’s very closely linked.

You’ve been playing for almost ten years, and over that time your music has logically been changing. Are you able to distinguish any kind of pattern in this evolution? Or do you see any kind of stage or phase?

Silvia: Well, I think it was COVID. The last concert we did before COVID we played with a band, Wackelkontakt, which we released at Màgia Roja, that is one of the best live shows I’ve ever seen. They played after us, and we we felt that ‘we really have to improve, they’re so much better than us’. And right after the pandemic started, and we had a lot of time to improve, to add elements to our live format and to make a lot of new music. I think we both agree that there was a before and after, that the band before and after the pandemic doesn’t even feel the same.

Viktor: Yes, we could have almost changed the name. No, but yes. When we listen to the old stuff they feel like ultra-demos to us. Another style, another group.

Silvia: And well, besides that, the fact that we’ve been playing live a lot since 2021 also makes a difference. From 2021 until now we’ve also evolved quite a bit, but not as much, I think, as the very drastic change of the pandemic.

Viktor: That’s when we added this metal plate with distortion. We said ‘let’s play more percussion, let’s make everything more dynamic and more elaborate’.

Silvia: And more intense. At the beginning, when we started, we weren’t really sure what we wanted to do live. It was like, ‘Well, we have these songs, we play them, and that’s it’. But over time we wanted to give it a bit of a trance feel, of taking people and taking them up a notch.

Viktor: Another key point was when we did a tour in trio format with a drummer [Jesse Webb, from Gnod] in October 2019, also just before the pandemic. There was already a bit of a ‘wow, we can do more’ vibe. When I played the synth, if there was a drummer, I got more excited, and it’s like you suddenly feel that intensity and you say wow, this is cooler.

Silvia: Then, the next solo tour, in Europe, was one of the lowest moments of all, we felt a level drop. We thought: we have to get to the same thing that we have achieved being three of us. It was actually a process.

Viktor: Yes, and two or three months after that was the Wackelkontakt gig, and right after that was the pandemic. And it was like, okay, we have to do more, but now, NOW. But in fact we had already been in this process for a few months.

In the press release you say that this latest album, ‘Toda la verdad sobre Dame Area’, closes a kind of story arc started by ‘Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area’. What does that story arc consist of?

Viktor: The first albums are very eclectic, they are kind of putting together what was coming to us. But eventually we started to say: it would be cooler to make them thematic. We released ‘Ondas Tribales’, which brings together a bit of tribal stuff. So we said: what if we make one that is all the most… melodic, more synths and such, and then we will release another one that has more industrial, noisy, screams, all that. And the first one is ‘Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area’, which also has some experimental and noise stuff, but it’s more focused on the melodies, but with the idea of ​​innovating from the classic… Hence ‘La Nueva Era’ which starts as synthpop but ends up being noise and is almost… orchestral? The thing is that it hadn’t occurred to us that when we released ‘Toda la mentira’ we would play a lot and that people at the live shows would say ‘I was expecting this album that you just released and damn, this is way more powerful’.

Silvia: We only play live three songs from ‘Toda la mentira’, we play a lot more from the one that is going to be released now, ‘Toda la verdad’. In fact we have even played the whole album (‘Toda la verdad’) in just one live show. Maybe in that aspect the idea hasn’t worked out 100%. But well, we did have the concept. Three or four years ago we said: the next album will be ‘Toda la mentira’ (‘All the lies’), and then we will do it like a twin, ‘Toda la verdad’ (‘All the truth’), and they will be like two different facets, like Ying Yang. What ‘Toda la verdad’ was going to be when we thought about it four years ago was not so clear to us, but it has turned out to be like what we are live right now.

 

Viktor: The title has ended up being the reality. ‘Toda la verdad’ is the truth of what we are live.

Silvia: But when ‘Toda la mentira’ came out we already had songs that ended up in ‘Toda la verdad’, we just didn’t record them. We thought about all this during the pandemic. We already thought about what the covers would be like and everything. Afterwards, well, it evolved, but we had already conceptualized it.

Viktor: We have had a lot of people saying ‘the album is cool, but damn, the live performance is so much better, and where is this song? And this one? And this one?’. We have spent two years explaining that those songs were going to be on the next one.

You are a band with a very strong do-it-yourself component, what has moved you to put yourselves in the hands of a recording studio for the first time?

Silvia: It has been a very cool experience. I think we wanted to do it be as good as possible. Of the two of us Victor is the most technical person, although we both do the production. But well, we have limits, and with this album we wanted to make it as real as possible. We also worked with Willi [Guillermo Rojo, from Somos La Herencia], which was a very good idea. We really liked him and he helped us a lot throughout the process, and also being in the studio. We had never recorded in a studio like Dame Area and we weren’t very clear about what to do and how to function there. It’s very good to have a person who supports you, who has everything clear, who gives you an order: ‘…we have to do this, this is important…’

Viktor: Going to a studio has also changed the process. Before recording you have to play the songs live because, well, you have to be sure if you’re going to pay a lot of money. Previously we were comfortable with this thing of ‘ok recorded, great!’, and then you start playing it and the songs evolve live, they gets better. This time we did it the other way around. We planned it: we’re going to play this live a lot, let it evolve naturally and then we’ll record it.

Silvia: Maybe spending money on a studio also makes you more of a perfectionist, you raise the bar a bit. Before, when recording at home, you had more of that ‘well we captured the magic moment of the first take’ thing, and many times it was over there. And now, not at all. With this album, I think we have pushed ourselves quite hard.

Viktor: We were very conformist.

I suppose that going to the studio also makes your demands higher, because when you walk out that door it has to be good. At home or in the studio, it doesn’t matter because you can record it again next week.

Viktor: Yes. I also think that playing it live and observing the reaction of the audience, their feedback, contributes a lot. Like ‘this intro was too long,’ or ‘how cool is this thing that maybe we weren’t sure about it,’ or ‘this part is too short, why don’t we do more’. Then you try it out and maybe you say no, it doesn’t work, it was already good. I don’t know, I don’t think we’ll ever go back.

Silvia: No, these are things we’ve learned. It’s also very noticeable to have technical people who know what they’re doing. The difference is that you didn’t have a fucking clue, and for them it’s normal. They’ve made us sound much better. And so have the people in the studio. It’s a real privilege to be able to go to a place like that.

Viktor: I think this album is the first album of ours that I’ve listened to and felt satisfied with the result. And I don’t say this about every album. It’s the first album that I’ve had this feeling and that I can listen to. Normally I can’t listen to any previous album.

Your live performances connect with people from all possible niches, very diverse people, and bring hidden musical influences to unexpected audiences. People who probably would never have come across these references through any other means enjoy it to the fullest. After all this reflection: have you ever been afraid that the festive part of your live performances may eat up your artistic proposal?

Silvia: A good question.

Viktor: I have a problem when we are sometimes labelled as dance music. First of all, dance music is a label that doesn’t describe anything. You can dance to almost anything, you can dance to abstract music if you want to dance to it, you can dance to doom metal. You can dance to everything. I mean, I don’t have a problem with dancing, but I do have a problem with people thinking Dame Area is ‘just’ dance music. I find it weird because it’s like, well, yeah, obviously you can dance to it, but I don’t see it as a purely recreational thing, it’s not just that. I see it as something else, that has more layers.

Silvia: Personally, I like to play the most during concert hours, between 9pm and 11pm, so to speak. It’s not always the case, but generally, later in the day, people’s energy changes, people want to be more drunk, more high, more dancing, they’re less attentive, and you can’t afford to do a concert that much, you have more pressure to keep up the pace; you can’t do that much downtime, because people don’t follow you. And I personally like playing in that kind of context less. I don’t think it eats up the other stuff, but maybe just because we continue to play a lot at other times too. In fact, now, during the album presentation, most of them are concerts in clubs, which is the time we like the most. Sometimes I get down, but it’s also true that sometimes we’ve played later and it’s been really cool, at Tresor or Berghain, where we play ‘late’, like at 1 or 2, they’ve been my favorite concerts of the year. So you never know.

No doubt the physical part is definitely a virtue of your music. The fact that it is able to provoke that in people can only be understood as a merit. My question was more whether you have ever feared that this part would detract from other components. In other words: your music has an instrumental complexity, a series of proposals, changes, very well thought-out concepts, the lyrics…

Viktor: We usually run into that after the concert. I don’t know, for example, people start talking to me about Detroit techno, and of course I thank them, but in my insides I think ‘well, no’. Nothing against Detroit techno, but for us it’s not a reference. I don’t think that any pure dance music in particular is a reference for us.

Silvia: Well, EBM. I don’t know if you consider it dance music.

Viktor: I don’t see it as dance music. When it has a message and a little more depth to me it’s not dance music, because for me dance music means that it’s only dance music and there’s nothing else there.

Well, there is Northern Soul, which is also music for dancing and it has some social and political connotations that are not explicit, despite the fact that they are often instrumental songs and in the end people want to stay up all night dancing.

Viktor: It doesn’t have to be bad, but we don’t feel very identified with that. The thing is that we like the trance of dancing to be able to take you further, that the music can make you think or get you excited. There is a great variety of emotions that go beyond the physical and the recreational.

Silvia: I think we look for… I don’t know, everyone can experience our concerts however they want, but the physical part is important to me, that part of getting people to let themselves go, and going a little further thanks to the physicality of letting go. For me that is important.

And it is very meritorious because not everyone is able to take people to that physical experience. A very powerful live performance is necessary for all those diverse audiences to connect at that level.

Viktor: Yes, that’s another one. In terms of audience diversity, it’s normal that many people don’t understand it in the same way as us, because our audience is so broad… It’s really quite extreme how broad it is, people come who could be our mothers or whatever, black metalheads, and people so different say ‘wow, I love it’. I don’t know, it’s unusual.

Dame Area took off practically at the same time that Màgia Roja as a physical space ceased to exist. However, you still maintain Màgia Roja as a label and as a promoter, although with reduced activity. What has Dame Area inherited from Màgia Roja?

Silvia: Everything. Well, perhaps less in recent years because we’ve already distanced ourselves a bit, as you said, at some point we started to take references from the bands we see when we play all over the place. But well, we always say that without Màgia Roja Dame Area would not exist. The group was born there, from sharing, from watching groups live. That’s where my desire to do something was born, and we’re going to do something together, and sharing music every weekend you take the same references without talking, and then when you start playing things that come out have stuff in common. And the fact of having that place allowed us to rehearse there, to play our first shows there, to share stage with bands that had come to play…

Viktor: I think that all the albums up to ‘Esto me pertenece’ were recorded 100% there. ‘Esto me pertenece’ and ‘Toda la mentira’ were mostly recorded in Màgia Roja, although some stuff and overdubs and such were recorded in our new studio.

Silvia: And the scene that existed in Barcelona in those years, the other bands that we played with, that we invited, and that in fact are still our friends, inspire you. Then when you start playing something comes out that is inspired by it. But now I think it has opened up a bit, now we have, I think, other influences, bands that we share the stage with on tour.

Viktor: I think we have also influenced ourselves. Once you get to know what your identity is, there are things that emerge from within yourself. Màgia Roja, of course, was key, but not anymore. We continue to release things and we really like the label, but we have less and less time. Especially to put on shows, we still manage to release albums. In fact, last year I think that with the label we made the best crop of records in its history, with Bound By Endogamy, Fotocopia and España.

And do you miss Màgia Roja as a space? Only two or three years ago I remember you saying that you were looking for a venue. Have you completely abandoned the idea of ​​having a space open to the public again?

Silvia: Right now it is abandoned, because we don’t have time. But I don’t close it for the future. And yes, I miss it. Yes, of course, the community. You see each other there every weekend, it’s a place to meet and share. And what we’re experiencing right now is really cool, but of course, there are two of us, and before, you shared it with a lot more people. And that’s really nice.

Viktor: I think that Màgia Roja on a certain level is perhaps the most exceptional thing we’ve ever done in our lives. And I get the feeling that it will be unrepeatable. We could do something else, but I think that experience was so crazy and so impossible…

Silvia: We were innocent. Probably after experiencing it once you’ve lost that innocence and that madness. It wouldn’t be similar because when you think about it you’re like: ‘how could we do that’. Now I don’t see myself taking on that much risk.

Viktor: On so many levels… it was so crazy.

Viktor: And well, it wasn’t just the two of us, but the whole group of people who created it. All the people in Barcelona who came and everything. It’s like a whole series of circumstances came together there that made it very special and it seems very difficult to repeat the same thing. And damn, we do miss it, but at the same time it’s not realistic, there’s no time for us or for the rest of the team that was there. But well, if we could ever do something else it wouldn’t be bad.

Silvia: Now is not the time.

Viktor: Of course. The pity about a venue is that a venue doesn’t go on tour. Only the people who are in Barcelona can enjoy it.

Silvia: But you host them. I like that a lot. Almost every weekend there were groups from abroad, and they were in your house, and there was an exchange. I liked that a lot too.

Also in the end what happens in a city spreads to the rest of the country, even if it’s at its own pace. I mean: the shock wave of what was happening in Màgia Roja reached Galicia, the other side of Spain.

Viktor: Even in Europe, we’ve been told ‘I’ve read about it…’, ‘it must be incredible…’ and so on. With a band you go on tour, you show up, and the people who see you already know you. But a venue has roots that… either you were there or you weren’t.

But a venue creates community and it creates territory. And by going on tour you don’t directly create either of those things.

Viktor: Yes, that’s true.

Silvia: But you contribute to the community there.

It’s true.

Viktor: We still live in the community that was created in Màgia Roja.

Silvia: And the friendships. We met our best friends there, and they have helped us in difficult times. It transcends. It’s beautiful.

I’m going to ask the last question, we’re late, I’m skipping two. Silvia’s lyrics seem to condense universal messages, and I think that makes them connect especially with the public. What are your inspirations for writing lyrics?

Silvia: Well, I think I’ve been trying different ways. Now I feel like I’m in a moment of a bit of crisis, of creative block. On this last album we have collaborated on some lyrics and I think that they are better that way, writing them together.

Viktor: Well, it depends. You’ve written some of them yourself.

Silvia: When I started I did it totally with improvisation. When we made a song we used to I play it while I was doing totally improvised takes. I tried to visualize images and describe the images that the music inspired in me. And I think that on that sense now I have raised the bar too, you want to do things that are more transcendent, that have more message, that are stronger. Maybe at the beginning it was more like saying three phrases that sound good together and that’s it. Now I want to work harder and I don’t use improvisation as much. I start writing, I write again, I make several drafts, I share them with Viktor, we exchange ideas. Sometimes we are also inspired by lyrics from other groups, or songs that we like. But now I am a bit in creative block.

I would say that that happens cyclically.

Silvia: Yes, yes. And that for me is the hardest part. Totally. You feel like shit and you get depressed and you feel like you’re not going to be able to do it anymore. It’s difficult. And sometimes afterwards it comes out and you’re super excited. And so on all the time.

Viktor: I’ve never written a whole lyric for Dame Area, I think. In ‘Toda la mentira’ I think I collaborated on three or four and on this one too, about half of it.

Silvia: I like it as an experience. It’s complicated anyway, because you’re sharing ideas that are perhaps very intimate. If the other person doesn’t like something, it’s perhaps even harder than with regard to the instrumental part. But of course I think that by getting together you reach things that you wouldn’t have been able to reach alone.

Viktor: I also think that being a couple makes it a bit possible, you need a great level of trust and intimacy.

Silvia: I’ve tried different tactics too, like opening random pages of books, doing cut-ups and such. We have a new song from a week or two ago and the lyrics came from a Burroughs book.

Viktor: There’s a song that you got the lyrics from the Bible, you were singing it in Latin.

Silvia: Yes, ‘Devoción’, it’s on the album. ‘Aquí estoy, este es mi cuerpo’ (‘Here I am, this is my body’). It was actually an image, ‘Ad hoc enim Corpus meum’, in Latin. It was Jesus sacrificing his body. It comes from that, but when I sing it, changing the context, the meaning changes.