Hidden Hind
Front & center with Alessandra Testoni of Hidden Hind.
Hidden Hind just released their self-titled EP from Sherpa Records and we have your first listen accompanied by an insightful discussion. Heralding from Brescia, Italy; Alessandra Testoni is the commanding lyrics and vocal officer, Davide Rosa setting the guitar moods & scenes, Gabriele Lussignoli on guitar reinforcement duty, Alberto Ronca on bass, and percussionist Gianluca Raia who founded the group initially. Putting their collective heads together under a banner of moon-beamed dream drawn musical affections where connective elements of synergistic fibers heard in the feelings emitted from audio mix.
Not even hiding their beloved affinity for 90s influences and more, Hidden Hind taps into some of the key compact disc condensed veins that exhibits the group’s acute understandings of what that decade’s sound was really all about. A proper 90s alternative track had to have something that stood between the gulf and abyss of danger and the mystical lands of something otherworldly and/or immortal in aspiration or lyrical/musical allusion. “Nymphs” accomplishes this right off the back as the ear catching opener where the listener is taken to something of a mystical forest of fairies and fear. Tracks like “Picture Show” fire up dream-pop projectors that depict midnight matinee specials of star-crossed exchanges, right before diving down into the sleepy, slo-mo codeine cough syrup water-slide tunnels of the big slow scuzzy anthem of “D’s Dream”. But before you pigeon hole Hidden Hind as a crew that leans too heavily in the revivalist directions, every anachronistic iota of audio is keenly wrapped up into a richly arrangement collection of hooks as heard on the ultra-bright beacon of international radio ready luster of “Give A Twirl”, while Davide’s dangerous chords keeps a menace in the foreground to match Alessandra’s sometimes foreboding delivery. Alessandra also joins us in the following interview.
Give us outsiders everything we should know about Brescia.
Well well, so you want to know something about Brescia. You’re lucky, I’ve just had an exam about Brescia and its surroundings and I can assure you there’s so much beauty in it that even Brescia citizens aren’t aware of it. You must know that we’re not talking about a big town, but we’re in Italy, and each small town has a story to tell. Brescia has a magic one but…I’ll leave you the suspense. Talking about the musical side of the town, it surely does have something valuable to offer to your nights (but if you’re hard to satisfy you can always drive to the nearest Milan).
How do your local scenes and surroundings both in/and beyond Brescia inform the sounds that comprise the audio realm of Hidden Hind?
Hidden Hind are a five-piece band and this means there are five different minds in it. The marvelous thing is that everyone of us loves a kind of music that the other one probably hates, and consequently influences the audio realm in his special way. I don’t know how massive has been the influence of the musical background of our city and its surroundings; there are clearly some great bands here in Brescia, for example the amazing Bee Bee Sea and Giulia Bonometti—aka Tight Eye—who you should have interviewed sometime ago for the same Week In Pop column, some old and some new, and they all deserve attention. Some of them are and have surely been more influential than others for us, but it depends, as I said, on each member of the band.
Uncovering the hidden world of Hidden Hind; photographed by Celeste Lombardi.
Describe for us how you all compose and flesh out your songs.
This is the hardest question to answer to. You must know that every track comes from the dreamy mind of one of the guitarist, Davide, especially from a moment in which a muse, or some kind of goddess, decides to inspire him. You should see him when there’s one of those moments, it’s always kinda funny but amazing at the same time. You can only make him stop playing by switching off his amp. Everything in our songs is a product of his mind, except for the lyrics, those ones are my children. Just like my guitarist, I can’t say precisely how I create them, they just come, like a spontaneous overflow. We are magic, aren’t we?
Tell us too about the making of your recent singles “Nymphs” & “Picture Show”; the things that inspired them, and what else we can look forward to on the forthcoming Hidden Hind EP.
As I just said, there are no reasonable explanations for the birth of our songs. It’s like even their creator finds it hard to explain. “Nymphs” is magic: it takes you through this enchanted forest or wood where you can’t help but getting lost in it, while “Picture Show” is something like our ace in the hole, we chose it as our first single and I can say that each one of us, the first time he listened to it, was incredibly proud of it, more than ever. The rest of our EP will be a surprise: we like to say we don’t belong to a single musical genre, every day we could decide to start working on a different one. However, our first five tracks have a strong guideline, which connects them and leads you through the listening.
Forestall friends Hidden Hind; photographed by Andrea Viola.
Top three things that you all are really excited about right now?
At the top of the list of the exciting upcoming things there is the release of our EP, for what we’d really like to thank Sherpa Records. They are amazing. Then, we hope we will start playing live soon, in Brescia but also in other cities for sure. We are hyper —excited.
Hidden Hind self-titled EP is available now from Sherpa Records.
