When I joined Veil of Sound, I was struck by a sentence: “lifting the veil from underground music”. These words made me realise that I had joined a team with ideas similar to mine, passionate like me about music that needs to be found, digging and listening to things you wouldn’t listen to if they didn’t walk by in front of you or if someone recommended it to you, and for me Duocane are the perfect example of such a thing.
I first discovered Duocane in 2020. During the pandemic, I started searching Bandcamp for new music, and I casually found their first EP called Puzza di Giovani (“Stink of Youth”). Immediately I was fascinated about how raw and heavy these guys were playing, with just a drummer and a bassist.
Stefano (bass & vocals) and Giovanni (drums & percussions) started this project in 2019. Since then their music has evolved, but they always kept the strength and the attitude they had before.
”Asilo Politico” (“Political Asylum”) was released on May 23, and it was the results of many years working around that near 19-minute-song. Speaking with Giovanni, he told me that the idea for this track was born a long time ago and also the realisation of every part took a lot of work. When they felt ready to play the entire song, they went to the Death Star Studio and recorded the whole song live in only one take.
This music could be a soundtrack to a movie that doesn’t exist yet, except in the mind and words of Giovanni. As he wrote, in this music he sees the soundtrack of his friend Jalal, that left Afghanistan in 2018 with the aim of arriving in Hannover, in Germany. Every part of this song seems to tell us a part of Jalal’s journey, starting with his departure from Baghdad in 2018, until reaching his destination in 2025.
These seven years are punctuated through the parts of the song, and every riff helps us imagine what Jalal went through. Even though this song was not born nor was it written to tell the story of Jalal, the passages of the songs can let us feel something of his story.
For example, let’s take the fourth part, that goes from 7:28 to 9:00, and what the drummer for the band has written for that part: “Jalal works in a bakery in Torre a Mare (Bari), he needs the money to bribe the Pakistani police who have to grant visas to his wife and children”; this apparent calm with only a noise rising quietly, interrupted only by the bass of Stefano, with a melancholic riff that brings us to the next part, when “Jalal’s social worker tells him that he can’t work without a contract, and he doesn’t know what it means”.
As the band said releasing that record, this EP is the soundtrack of a film that doesn’t exist yet. The long track is only instrumental, so everyone can find their own meaning in it. Well, I agree with the interpretation made by Giovanni (although, unlike him, I don’t know Jalal personally), this is a story that could be the soundtrack of the lives and of the journey of all the people that risk their lives every day to try to find a better life.
In the end, I would like to leave you with the literal translation of the track list made by Giovanni of Duocane.
Tracklist:
00:00 - 01:06: 1 - Jalal says goodbye to his children, takes a backpack and leaves Afghanistan.
01:06 - 04:10: 2 - Jalal sleeps on a bus while his wife travels to Pakistan with four kids and a letter to his cousin.
04:10 - 07:28: 3 - Jalal is beaten without further explanation by policemen in Croatia, sleeps in the cold and has his blood on his hands.
07:28 - 09:00: 4 - Jalal works in a bakery and shit in Torre a Mare, Bari, he needs the money to bribe the Pakistani police who have to grant visas to his wife and children.
09:00 - 10:56: 5 - Jalal’s social workers explain to him, dismayed and annoyed, that he cannot work illegally, he doesn’t even know what that means.
10:56 - 13:32: 6 - Jalal understands that the point of the laws is to leave him and those like him in an indefinite wait, which can last for years, so that all the Jalals of the world eventually do something illegal and can finally be held in contempt.
13:32 - 18:32: 7 – Jalal understands why the documents from the place where he was born are worth shit and yours are worth gold. Jalal understands why he and his sons have to make all this fuss to go shovel shit in Germany, while we take a Lufthansa plane to go take bad photographs in Berlin. Jalal understands all this, I don’t. Jalal is very thirsty inside.
