La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio: Bava and Blastbeats

What would you get if you mixed the introspective psychedelia of Krautrock, with the aesthetic of Italian sci-fi cinema? And what if it were written and performed by ardent metalheads, with a penchant for the extreme? Allow us to introduce LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO: Milan’s cosmic metal collective.

Distorted Sound spoke to keyboardist, vocalist, and visionary Melissa Crema ahead of the arrival of their second full-length release, Trivial Visions. The group take their name from the title of an early Italian sci-fi classic, directed by Paolo Heusch and Mario Bava. “We chose that name because we’re fascinated by sci-fi films, and we like that film a lot,” explains Melissa. “We like to transpose the themes of that film into our music; that’s why we chose that name.” The film depicts the aftermath of a failed lunar mission: a jettisoned atomic rocket explodes in an asteroid cluster, sending debris hurtling towards the Moon and Earth. Destructive planetary forces are unleashed; firestorms, tsunamis and earthquakes ensue. Efforts to destroy the incoming asteroid cluster are frustrated by a scientist, who believes the event is divine retribution for mankind’s use of nuclear weapons. They are eventually overcome, and the planet saved.

“It was born as ‘La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio’ in Italy, and it came out in England as ‘Death Comes From Outer Space’, but in the rest of the world it’s known as ‘The Day The Sky Exploded’,” Melissa explains. “It’s quite hard to pronounce outside of Italy, but it sounds a little weird in Italian, too: it’s a strange sentence, ‘Death Comes From Outer Space’, an unusual meaning. Only a few people here know our name is taken from a film, because it’s not that famous here. It’s a B-film, kind of underground.”

“In Italy in the seventies, some composers would just jam to compose the soundtracks for films. That was just the way it was done, and we tried to do the same thing in the beginning,” remembers Melissa. “We were an open collective initially, so each time we played there were different people on stage. We didn’t rehearse, and we weren’t composing songs. We would be invited to play somewhere, and we’d just improvise and create new songs as we went,” she continues. “That’s how our first album Sky Over Giza was born.”

Where Sky Over Giza channelled the formless and textured soundscapes of TANGERINE DREAM, their new album Trivial Visions draws more from the psychedelic heaviness of AMON DÜÜL and driving rhythms of CAN. You can hear some extreme metal elements in there as well, with sci-fi thrash flourishes not unlike NOCTURNUS A.D. and VOIVOD. “We were invited to play at Dunajam, so we had to have some proper songs to play,” Melissa jokes. “Trivial Visions is a much more structured work, with written songs. For Sky Over Giza, we just went into the studio with nothing written and freely improvised, making songs out of those recordings as we went along. For the new album the line-up had changed, and we definitely had a new mind-set too. They’re very different albums.”

We’re soon joined by Stefano Basurto: LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO guitarist, and Melissa’s husband. “I started off by listening to bands from Delirium Records. You know Delirium Records? They did the first PORCUPINE TREE albums, but also OZRIC TENTACLES, DEAD FLOWERS and KAVA KAVA. So I was playing guitar and listening to some unusual death metal, but I really connected with psychedelic rock. He’s been playing psych-rock for twenty-five years or more,” Melissa adds. “This music is very personal to him. At the very start it was just Stefano and Angelo our flautist: they started playing together, and invited people to join them at their gigs, small shows around Milan, without any plans or ambition to become a band or to go touring abroad. When I met Stefano we decided to give the project a proper identity and become a proper band. I got in contact with booking agencies and promoters, and we had a two week tour booked in the summer of 2019. We started growing as a band and Sky Over Giza, our experiment, helped us to do that. We had some songs to present and introduce us. People seemed to like them a lot. That’s how we were born. It was circumstantial.”

Discussion soon comes back around to cult sci-fi, and we swap notes on some of our favourites. “So you know about Mario Bava?” Melissa asks. We’d like to know more. “He was an Italian filmmaker, quite famous abroad. Apart from La Morte Viene Dallo Spazio, he directed the Black Sabbath film, which we know as I Tre Volti della Paura (or The Three Faces Of Fear). That’s the film BLACK SABBATH took their name from, of course. We also like La Maschera del Demonio (or The Mask of the Demon) which is also known as Black Sunday. I like Dario Argenta films too: he did Inferno and Tenebre, but he worked on lots of Italian horror films too, including Zombi (or Dawn Of The Dead).”

While there has recently been plenty of opportunity to sit on the sofa and indulge in cult sci-fi films, live music remains nothing but a tantalising prospect; we ask what ambitions LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO have for future performances. “Obviously I’d love to play at Roadburn,” Melissa enthuses. “And Hellfest. And Wacken, of course,” now grinning. “There are so many festivals I’d like to play at, I couldn’t begin to name them all. Stefano prefers the underground scene and festivals; I’m more for the big ones. We played at Red Smoke Festival in Poland last year. It was a small, underground festival but it was very nice. There were around two-thousand people there, so it’s not that big, but it’s a very familiar atmosphere. Of course it’s not the same as playing very big stages, but we like the big and the small.” We hope to see LA MORTE VIENE DALLO SPAZIO landing on stages big and small across Europe in the near-future.

Trivial Visions is out now via Svart Records. 

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