Spotlight: Sans Soucis ‘Confini’
☆ By Henry Ager ☆
WITH DEEP ROOTS TO HER ITALIAN AND CONGOLESE CULTURE - Sans Soucis creates “music for the soul” that is rich in raw emotion and cultural issues. London based Giulia Grispino’s solo project focuses around her incredible voice and personal production to paint a picture and tell a story that resonates with the listener.
Sans Soucis’ music has a varied sound that is partly due to her wide variety of influences, such as inspiration from songwriters Joni Mitchel and Nick Drake, composers like Henry Mancini and artists currently pushing the boundaries of pop or songwriting like Kadhja Bonet, Lianne La Havas, Frank Ocean and Rosalia, whilst smoothly blending this with her Italian and Congolese heritage. Bringing all of these influences together creates a diverse sounding portfolio that Sans Soucis links together through common themes and her voice. Her sound has three main sections or “universes”; guitar, production and vocals. Most of the music is based on guitar, inspired by Congolese Rumba, so this is often the beginning of her writing process. She plucks strings and makes chords, digging deeper in her exploration of sound until she is “connected to the earth and connected to the instrument”, constantly searching for something new and not wanting to replicate an old sound.
She shares, “When I am playing something authentic, I’ve never heard it before from my hands, that’s the moment I start writing.” This technique is an evident success as each song has its own individual sound. The production side is as equally experimental. However, this side is predominantly focused around recreating sounds she likes without letting technological or equipment restraints get in the way. She uses her voice or records everyday household items to create percussions and harmonies adding texture and character to her songs. The final part of her writing process is the vocals and lyrics, which currently come from a place of trauma. This leads to deep and evocative themes that run through her music.
Written as a lockdown song, Sans Soucis’ latest release “Confini” followers her Unfinished EP released earlier this year. Her friend and talented guitarist Matteo Da Ros sent a voice note of the guitar riff as a loop, and Sans Soucis instantly fell in love. Adding her own guitar, she then began mumbling the melody which came out in Italian, her native language. Singing in Italian is a very “primal need” for Sans Soucis, only occurring when she feels the need to reconnect with Italy.
For “Confini”, the origin of Sans Soucis’ need to write in Italian came from being sent a video from her mother of trucks transporting coronavirus victims to her hometown for burial. These images resonated with her and Confini became a prayer for Italy in which she explored the subject of death. Sans Soucis shares the need of sending hope and support to Italy “I wanted to write this song to give a funeral to these people”, however this hope and support has to be sent from afar because of her troubled relationship with the country. Sans Soucis’ motive for leaving Italy was due to fascist textures and systematic racism that have not been confronted properly. This background gives “Confini” an interesting conflicting relationship of love, and how she wants to show it, but feels like an exile. The song was a “scream” to demolish borders and help her to feel part of her country.
Sans Soucis’ two songs sung and written in Italian, “Amami” and “Confini”, both explore her relationship with the country she was raised in, both written in the different stages of anger and love she felt towards it. “Confini” reflects the stage where she is ready to offer her heart back and show a level of empathy towards Italy, that she did not feel when she first moved away. As Sans Soucis writes based on her feelings with Italy, she hopes it will spread knowledge and give support to other Black Italians, whilst adding to Italian and Congolese culture and further demonstrating her passion for positive change.
“Confini” was “made in lockdown for lockdown” and Sans Soucis thought it was only fitting to have the visuals match that with a home-made vibe. The single artwork is a photograph that she took at the beginning of lock down of some beautiful pink roses found near her home. The beauty of the roses might have been overlooked had we been going about normal life, but the slow pace of lockdown helped her to appreciate and notice them.
The video follows a similar theme, and is a collection of fan shot videos depicting their versions of lockdown. The idea is to bring together her fans hidden beauty that they have appreciated and found during lockdown. San Souics’ attention to detail when bringing visuals together is evident in all of her productions, using visuals that help to expand on the stories she is telling through her music.
Sans Soucis is passionate about spreading a positive message and making positive changes and this comes across in her music. It is also the focus of a recent interview series entitled “All men were produced by a female” with the intention of crediting female producers and building them a community. She shares, “So many times it’s happened when I was producing my own song and leading my session and the engineer would talk to someone else in the room when making decisions”. She feels these experiences cause female producers to discredit themselves and not recognize themselves as producers. She goes on to admit “I never thought of myself as a producer but in fact I was”.
Sans Soucis hopes that by building this platform for female producers to share experiences and share the tools to protect themselves, that female producers will become better represented within the music industry. She also believes that interviewing female producers will help educate others in the struggle that they face, and break down the subconscious bias that exists in the industry.
During the last half of 2019, following from her first EP The Lover, Sans Soucis released 3 singles; “Visable”, “Human” and “Mercy”, where she experimented with and developed her sound. She is looking to take the style and lessons learnt from this experimentation and apply it to future releases, whilst incorporating her previous musical influences.
Having shown her vast talent at creating different bodies of work in different styles we are excited to see where the next releases take her.
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