GGGOLDDD Interview (Milena Eva, Thomas Sciarone)

Interview by Davide Sciaky

Puoi leggere l’intervista in italiano qui.

First of all, how are we doing? 

Thomas: Good. 

Milena: Tired? 

T. A bit tired. We’re actually already two and a half weeks away from home. The tour is just like in, I think, 10th date today, something like that, 11th date. 

M: We’re at the point that we don’t know anymore where we were yesterday or where we will be tomorrow. 

T: But we left about a week earlier to do some extra rehearsal with the whole crew in Poland, just ahead of the tour. So, yeah. 

It’s been a while. 

T: Yeah, it’s been a while, but it’s been good. 

So, talking about this tour, a few days before it started you announced that you’d be touring as a four-piece. So, why is that? 

M: Well, there’s a few reasons, but I think the most important reason is that the two others couldn’t go on tour for so many weeks. Because of personal reasons, university for one and a kid for the other. So, we discussed it with the others, like, shall we still try to do it? And we found a way to make it work with just the four of us, which I think fits the new music, the new album a lot. And also we rewrote two of our older songs into new versions. We’re playing a new song. So, I think we were ready to do it in a different way anyway. 

T: We just didn’t feel like replacing the other two. So, we just thought it would be more interesting to find a way of doing it without them. And I’m really happy with how it’s working out. So, people who have seen the shows or will see the show tonight or the rest of the tour, I’m sure they’ll see it’s not a compromise. But it’s just a different version. Yeah, definitely. 

Last year you published your latest album which you had written for and debuted at Roadburn the previous year. I know the lyrical topic is very personal, very hard to talk about, so, I’m not going to ask you if it was hard to talk about the abuse you suffered. I mean, that’s obvious. But did you debate for a long time whether to make music about it or not? Or was it sort of easy to just decide to talk about that? 

M: I don’t think we ever debate on what my lyrical topics are. I just decide.

I mean like an internal dialogue, do I want to put these things out there or do I want to keep them to myself?

M: Yeah, I kind of went really organically. So, first it was just one song. And I was, I think, open and honest in those lyrics. But I wasn’t sure if people would understand it. If I wouldn’t tell anybody. I thought that people wouldn’t notice. And at some point it became like this whole set that we made for Roadburn. So, the whole album. But a few days before we did that Roadburn show, we were still debating if we were going to tell anybody. Because if you hear music for the first time, which we were supposed to be doing with that commissioned piece, then there might be a lot of people not noticing what I’m saying. So, we were just like, never mind, doesn’t matter. And then I think we decided, or I decided to tell the world about what it was about. Also because one of the reasons I really wanted to share my point of view is, well, on one side it’s interesting, I think, for people to hear this side of the story. Because a lot of people don’t know about it. Mainly men, I guess. And the most important reason, I think, is that if you’re going through anything like this, then it’s really good to hear something like this. I wish I could have known somebody or an artist or, I don’t know, if I could have read a book or whatever. Back then, I would have been, I think, way less alone. So, that was the motivation, I think, to get it out there. To make sure that everybody knew what it was about. To just make sure that if you’re going through this, it can feel very alone. And you’re not. Because there’s a lot of people, especially women, who go through this. I think it should be a topic that we at least try to talk about. I understand that it’s super complicated. I know how complicated it is. But it’s important to talk about. 

I think the reaction of the people was really heartwarming. It was really positive. 

M: Yeah, it was. 

You know, there is a lot of nastiness on the internet, were you afraid you could get a different kind of reaction?

M: Totally. We discussed it before I posted it online. We discussed that Thomas would just watch all the socials and not me. So that I would not see any horrible responses. I think one of the main reasons that nobody really found it offensive, in a way, is because I don’t tell anybody who it was. If you tell… 

T: If you start blaming people. 

M: Yeah, then it gets really complicated. 

T: You see that, for instance, with Marilyn Manson. 

M: Yeah, definitely. Because the women that come out calling… What’s his face? I don’t know. What his real name is? Brian Warner or something? But that are coming out and telling people that it’s him doing it. There’s just so many people being so mad that their idol, their icon, the person they looked up to is doing that. That they just want to make it go away, kind of. And I think the reason why people responded really well to what I explained is probably the biggest reason is that I didn’t ever tell anybody. 

T: Yeah, there’s no naming and blaming. 

M: It’s only the point of view of somebody who goes through it. So it’s only about the pain and the shame and all that. And not necessarily about who did it. 

Also, musically, I think it’s a departure from what you were doing up until Why Aren’t You Laughing. Was that a conscious decision to better fit the lyrics or something? Or was it separate? 

M: In some way it was, I think. But I think the biggest reason was that we wrote the whole piece of music during COVID. We were at home. We already started experimenting with synthesisers and stuff like that with demos. So that was already happening, but we weren’t really sure if it was going to be on new music or whatever. We had the ambition, but it wasn’t really getting anywhere yet. And then we were stuck at home. So there was no way for us to be in a rehearsal space and make loud music in that way. So we decided to just write songs from scratch. Instead of doing it on a guitar, we started doing it on synthesizer. There were a few reasons. One of the reasons is that we did it at home instead of being in a rehearsal space with all of us, but just writing at home. I think it was nice to have a new sound with this new story. And also we were really looking for inspiration, maybe, to try and do something different. Because this is our fifth album, so we already did four albums with guitars. And I don’t want to say that it’s impossible to do good albums with guitars, because I love guitars. But I think for us it was really cool to just go into this unknown territory and play music in a very, almost, primal way. So we are definitely not virtuosos on piano or whatever. We’re just playing it with two fingers. So that was a whole new way of looking at making music. And I think that was also really exciting to us. So that was a way for us to just… 

T: We wanted to experiment with electronics for a while, and COVID kind of gave us the opportunity and also kind of forced us to do it. And I think the relation between the topic and music is COVID. I think COVID got you [talking with Milena] in a position that you got confronted with your past trauma, as well as it forced us to kind of write music in a new way. And I think that’s the relation between the two. 

M: Yeah. 

For this album you had some photos taken…
M: In Milano! Yeah!. 

Yeah, I saw that! They are absolutely beautiful, they feel like a Renaissance painting. They are also very metaphorical, I think. So how did they come to be? Was it your idea? Did you talk with the photographer? Did you work on that together? 

M: Well, I actually followed… the photographer’s name and also the creative director of these pictures is Szilveszter Makó. He’s from Milano. He lives here. He’s not from here, but he lives here. He works here. And I had been following him for a while because I just love his work. He works with a lot of bigger fashion brands that I really love. So I was interested in his work, but never in the way that I thought it was going to be somebody who we would work with. And at some point, we just had, I don’t know, Friday afternoon, we just thought, fuck it. Let’s write him a message and we’ll see if he responds. And we got a response, I think, in 30 minutes or something of him just saying like, yeah, let’s make it work. Let’s see if we can do something like this. So he already did something with armour kind of photography, but we came up with the idea of putting the armour on the cover of the album. So we experimented a lot with also dresses and armour that there’s other press pictures where I’m not wearing the full armour, but the full armour was really like the best way to explain the survivor kind of situation, like somebody who’s come from battle kind of. And also like the really tough look of somebody, but feeling very vulnerable inside. 

T: The shell that you created to deal with trauma. 

M: So that’s what we kind of discussed with Szilveszter as well. And then his photography is really like, this is how we reached out to him as well. His work is really, I think, like Renaissance paintings indeed. And one of the reasons is that it’s with actual daylight. So he uses elements that are in Renaissance paintings as well, I think.
T: I think the quality of his work is that it feels very classic, but also super modern. And that’s what we really liked about it. And he can tell a whole story in a picture. 

M: Yeah, this is what we wanted, to make clear that it was not just a cover, but it was a whole story. 

T: And it’s a story that triggers your fantasy. So it’s not like, okay, this is the only kind of story that it can imagine. No, you can envision a whole range of stories in there. And I think that’s what makes it work for us. 

This album, as we said, was commissioned by Roadburn. Was it always the plan to eventually record it in the studio? 

M: No, definitely not. We got asked by Walter. So Thomas and I got a call from him. And he said, do you want to do a commissioned piece? We said yes straight away. He said, think about it. We called him back two days later, like, we still want to do it. And then he just gave us carte blanche. He said, you can do a commissioned piece with somebody else. If there’s an artist you want to work with, do whatever you want to do. And we kind of immediately decided, like, okay, we want to do something with this new style of sound or music. 

T: As Gold. 

M: As Gold. So we started working on that straight away, more or less.

So he asked the two of you personally, not as Gold.
M: Yeah, as us two. 

T: Yeah. So it was our decision to do it as Gold. Yeah, and the time frame we had was like half a year, I think, before the Roadburn Redux performance. And we just didn’t really even get to think about recording. We were so focused and maybe also a bit stressed on getting it done in time. 

M: Yeah, writing an album… recording would have been completely crazy. Writing it and rehearsing it the way we did to make sure that we could play it live with all new instruments…
T: Yeah, it was insane. It’s not something I would recommend any artist to do. 

M: No, no. Especially not in COVID times, because the situation at the Redux show was really specific. Our sound engineer couldn’t be in the room with us because of the COVID restrictions. So he had to be in a different room. He couldn’t touch the desk, the sound desk. There was somebody else who was doing that. So he had to shout at that guy. It was really ridiculous. There was this whole film crew, of course. You could only walk one way through the building. You couldn’t walk back. It was really extreme COVID times. I mean, now you don’t really realise how complicated it was like that.

T: But after the show, and especially after the tons of reactions that we got on the show, we quite quickly decided…

M: We quickly decided that we wanted to record it. So luckily we were in the position that we could record it the summer after. So a few months later. And I mean, we were already done with writing it. So that was nice. [Laughs]

Of course, it’s been a great success for you. I guess because of that, the following year, they asked you to curate the actual festival. I think you were probably the most underground artist to ever be asked to do that. 

M: I’m sure we were. 

Usually it’s more well known artists or artists who have been around for a long time and have a sort of “legendary” aura. So how did it feel to be asked that and to have this whole experience? 

T: Well, of course, the first thing is…

M: It was the same thing. Walter called us. He said, do you want to do it? And we said, yes. He said, think about it. [Laughs] We called him back two days later and we said, we want to do it. 

T: Because it’s such an honour. You’re not going to not do it. And it’s also, at least for me, it’s like a childhood dream. Like, this is the first time I ever went to a festival, probably Dynamo Open Air back then. I’ve always been thinking about how I would curate the stage or part of the lineup. So it’s, yeah, it was. 

M: I think there were a few moments where we were a bit hesitant. Like, how are people going to respond to this? Because there were a lot of, obviously, there’s a lot of people going to Roadburn that didn’t even know us. But we had so much fun doing the, like, sending playlists to Walter, like, sharing whatever we would want to see on the festival and making that work. And I think we got really lucky that in the times that we were planning it, we were actually able to get acts like Liturgy from the States to the Netherlands or Amnesia Scanner or all these acts that weren’t really touring at that moment but could come to the festival because we curated them. But there was only one act that couldn’t come because of other reasons. But luckily, it was Backxwash and luckily she came this year. So we did get to see her perform live. 

I mentioned before the photos, but I think everything around this album is very artistic. Also the videos here are very metaphorical, they are very cinematographic, I think, in a way. So again, did you do all this thinking behind it by yourself or did you have someone to talk with and to give you ideas? 

M: No, we do all of that ourselves. We worked with different video companies from Rotterdam to actually make them. But the ideas behind it were our own. 

T: Apart from the video for The Shame Should Not Be Mine, that was really the director’s idea to do it that way. But the other three, those were mainly visions that Milena had already. Ideas that Milena had. 

M: The one for Notes [On How to Trust], the one for Spring, the one for Invisible, those were our ideas. 

T: Yeah, but we do like to keep… No, it’s not necessarily that we like to have control over it, but we do have strong visions and ideas about… 

M: The only thing I need is a budget! [Laughs] Seriously, this is really… 

T: It’s never enough. [Laughs]

M: No, no, no, it is enough. At some point it will be enough, but I really want it to be this whole idea of how it looks on stage, how it is on the album, how the artwork looks, how the videos look. I want it to be like a universe of what we do. And hopefully at some point we’ll get there, but at the moment we have to do it with what we have. 

T: Even for the Roadburn Redux, for some songs, you kind of had a visual idea first how it would look on stage and how it would be on stage, and then you would kind of write the soundtrack to that. More than that we would just be writing music and then afterwards we would be thinking about the visual aspect of it. For us it’s always… 

M: Yeah, we’re working on new music now and I sent a picture that I have in a moodboard for the new album to the guys, and one of the guys said, I don’t think I ever made music with a collage, like a moodboard. But my mind works like that. I have a very clear vision of the new album as well. I really know what it should look like. I’m not sure if it’s going to look like that, but it’s definitely what I’m aiming for at the moment.

T: For now as inspiration it works. 

M: Yeah, I think so too. 

Last week you released a new song, I Let My Hair Grow, which again talks about trauma, about the aftermath of trauma. Do you think you’ll keep exploring this topic in the future or is it sort of part of the same cycle and maybe you’ll move to some other topics? 

M: I think I will keep exploring it. I’m not sure if every song is going to be about this. I’m not sure if our whole discography is about it, but I know that before this album there were already songs on earlier albums that I now know are about this. There were just eerie feelings that I tried to write down, but I couldn’t really pin down what it was about. And now I know. I think I always write about what I experience and how I experience it. And in COVID times the trauma came up. I knew that this was something that happened to me, but I tried to keep it down. I tried to just overpower it with a lot of working, a lot of touring, a lot of just running around. And because of COVID I couldn’t anymore, so I kind of had to write about this topic. I think it will always be like this, but it really depends on what happens in my life as well. It could be an album about love too. [Laughs] Whatever is the current situation is what I will write about. 

My next question is, if I’m not mistaken, you two besides being musical partners are also partners in life. Is having so many parts of your life intertwined difficult to manage, in a way? Do you have to keep things separated or is it maybe easier to do all these things because you are together? 

T: We keep nothing separated. [Both laugh]

M: We are a symbiosis.

T: It works for us. Of course, every now and then it’s hard to keep the band out of our personal lives. So we will be sitting on the couch late at night and still be talking also about the band. 

M: I’ve been thinking about this thing. There’s this question that nobody really has the answer to. I feel like it’s one of the most important questions in life. What is love? Nobody really knows what it is. I think the most important thing for you is to find out what love means to you. I think for us love means making music together. Before this, I’ve been writing music since I was 16 or 15 or whatever. It never came out. I was always very insecure about it. To me, doing it with you is the reason that stuff is happening. I think for us, this is our love language. There’s nothing better than having a moment where it really clicks into a composition. Or you’re just very proud of a song that you recorded. I think that to me is probably what love is. [Laughs]

T: Yeah, but it’s also more. 

Well, thank you for asking that question for me. I wouldn’t have asked that but I got a very interesting answer. 

[Laughs]

My final question is actually already partially answered. It’s what’s next for you. You said you started already writing some music. Where are you at with that? Do you already have any plans when you release? Or are you working on just singles, an album?

M: We don’t know yet. We just released this new song. We didn’t really expect to release it this fast. We’re happy that we did. I hope to finish a new album at the end of this year or something like that. Hopefully, it will come out somewhere in 2024. We don’t have anything black and white. 

T: I wouldn’t bring up the hope of having a new album out before summer of next year. I think it’s fair to say it won’t probably be until September or October of 2024. That a full new album will be out. Also, with just how the music industry works now. Knowing that we will record something by the end of the year. It just needs the time to get to the end product. M: Although I had a lot of fun with just recording this new song. The week of Roadburn. It was a Wednesday before Roadburn. I just recorded the vocals for this track. It was released last week. 

T: Only three weeks later.

M: Three weeks later, we already released it. It could go very fast. But not an entire album. We did the artwork for the single. But it’s not like an actual… We couldn’t have done it with the photos of Szilveszter for the album. That’s way too fast. 

T: New album, end of 2024. Maybe in between, some singles. We’ll see.

M: We’ll see.