Dame Area are one of our favourite musical discoveries since making the move from London to Barcelona. Made up of duo, Viktor L Crux (Catalonia) and Silvia Kostance (Italy), the pair write music that takes in Indutrial, Post Punk, Synth Wave and even Flamenco as Silvia sings in Italian, Spanish and even a bit of Turkish for good measure.

Loverboy had our first Dame Area live experience at Mira Festival last year and were transfixed. The live experience is a wild ride to behold. Giving you raw energy, it’s like watching an exorcism. The band have already released numerous EPs and albums and it feels like they are only just getting started, promising their upcoming material to be even rawer, yet refined at the same time.

So, Dame Area, from what I understand you met via the legendary Magia Roja label. Can you tell us ore about it?
Viktor: I’ll try to summarise…we are part of a label/association, which is still going on and which had a venue for 5 years, a members club. It was truly a magical place! We have never been in a place like this, and that’s what many people said when they visited for the first time. The contract ended on March 2020, so it was very timely, the pandemic arrived and we found other things to do. It seems difficult to reopen it now, we would have to sacrifice a lot of Dame Area.

I’m currently reading about La Ruta De Bacalao. It feels like Magia Roja has the same kind of energy. Do you feel the spirit of that time in your music?
Silvia: We read a very good book about La Ruta recently (Bacalao by Lluis Costa), I highly recommend it, it’s full of crazy anecdotes and passionate people, it’s a pity this phenomenon is not more known outside Spain. To me there were many things in common between Magia Roja and the early Ruta del Bacalao: the combination of the most avantgarde music/art but with the best vibes you could imagine, the total freedom if you didn’t bother anyone, and no need for security nor rules as the members self-regulated. The amazing thing of Valencia is that this spirit was shared by tens of thousands of people in the city and in most of the surrounding villages, it wasn’t a minority movement, it was the popular music of young people at that time!
Viktor: While we are influenced by some common music, I don’t think we feel the spirit of Valencia of La Ruta. We feel the spirit of Màgia Roja and we feel the spirit of Valencia right now. We LOVE playing there, people there are wild, hottest audience we know.

You both have musical histories priot to Dame Area. What different genres have you worked in previously and which are apparent in Dame Area’s music?
Silvia: I studied classical piano for 8 years. Sometimes it shows in some melodies or chord progressions I guess. Besides that I did a couple of short projects which didn’t go beyond rehearsals. So I would say for me Dame Area is my first musical project really. I think something that works in our composition flow is this different background and experience that there is between Victor and me, which makes us approach music composition with a different perspective.
Viktor: I’ve had a couple of other industrial projects, I think this shows in the music. Also I had a band that did a sort of krautrock/experimental/postpunk thing.

Dame Area is very prolific in the amount of music you’ve released in a relatively short time. How has your sound developed since your first release? Where are you heading musically next?
Viktor: What people are seeing in the live shows is where we’re heading next. We are now much more dynamic, more intense, noisier and the music is more fluid, and we’re better with percussion. Hope this makes sense: I think we’re more raw and refined at the same time. This is not fully reflected in any record yet, we haven’t released anything that was recorded after playing again in september 2021.
Silvia: We have developed a lot, we have explored many flavors and things we are interested in, but at the core we have the same influences we had when we began: we like industrial music, but also minimal synth, post punk, flamenco, polyrhythms or krautrock and you can already see that in the first songs we did like Luce, Immagina il Passato, Ricorda il Futuro or Dicevi a me.

Silvia you sing in multiple languages. How do you decide which languages to use on each song? What characteristics do you feel each language has? Is one softer than the other? One more aggressive
Silvia: Between Italian and Spanish I really feel bilingual, so lyrics in both languages come out spontaneously and I don’t really choose which one to use. Sometimes if I’m speaking more Italian in that period then it’s easier for me to write something in Italian and the opposite. Sometimes I try in one language and I don’t really like how it sounds or it doesn’t fit well with the music and then I try the same lyrics but in the other one to see if it works better.
With Spanish I find it somehow easier to rhyme and to match the numbers of syllables, while Italian makes me write weirder/more experimental lyrics in the sense of song structure. With Italian I also feel I have less examples of bands I really love then in Spanish, so in a way I have less references, which in one aspect is good, it makes me get out of my comfort zone more I would say.
That’s different with Turkish (we have a bunch of released songs and a few more unreleased yet in Turkish). I don’t dominate the language so well, so it’s more like a conscious exercise like “Come on, this one let’s try it in Turkish”. I feel it more like a game: when you cannot express too well and your vocabulary is limited you come up with different kinds of themes/topics to talk about and different song structures.

You’ll have to help us with the themes you are singing about…
Silvia: We have some positive/hopeful lyrics and also really pessimistic/dark ones too. Some recurring themes are movement, empowerment, space, light, revenge, faith, alienation, breathing/air. “Innamorata del tuo controllo” is probably one of my favourites, I like that it’s ambiguous and says nasty things that can be sort of BDSM or political, depending on how you read it. I’m also pretty proud of the lyrics of “Tempio senza Luce” from our last LP, “La Soluzione é Una” and “Sdoppiatrice di anime” from a previous EP.
Viktor: I like many, ‘Innamorata’ is one of them, but today I would say “A volte sembra stia per finire”, because it goes from despair to hope and it’s so authentic, I know (and I can feel in the voice) that it’s sung from the heart. It makes me teary eyed everytime I listen to it. We don’t play it live though.

‘La Nueva Era’ is definitely an amazing moment in every live set. Tell us about this song and the importance it has for you, as a song but also as part of the live set. 
Silvia: This song came out jamming with me playing the electronic drums and Viktor playing keyboards. Viktor had to come up with something that felt full/complete just with keyboards. After having the basic track, I came up with the “orchestral” synth parts and then we started to think that we don’t know electronic songs that have dynamics like a rock band (especially this kind of minimal synth/synthpop) so we created this crescendo with volume, melody and distortion. Also it’s one of the first songs where we both collaborated in the lyrics.
Viktor: It’s one of our favorites for sure, it creates a cathartic moment live, but from time to time we don’t play it, because we like to do a different setlist at every show and we don’t like “depending” on specific songs.

The live experience is so raw. I love it. Has it been like this from the beginning? How has it developed?
Viktor: Thanks! Silvia was always an intense performer but the shows weren’t like this from the beginning. Playing a lot has had a big influence, sometimes you don’t know if something is good or bad until you play it in front of people. The first couple of years we started to take more care of the flow of the show, then our last show before the lockdown was with Wackelkontakt and they were soooo good that we felt the urge to improve ourselves big time. Then the lockdown came and we had all the time needed to improve the live show and write new songs. We incorporated more percussion, more noise, more dynamics and did some adjustments to the set up and when it was possible to play again in 2021 we felt we were almost a new band.
Silvia: Also from that point on (2021), we committed ourselves to always play a different setlist. This makes us work constantly to improve but also forces us to try new things, and the result is that we now have a bigger pool of songs and things we can do and we’re learning to do the show in many different ways. Sometimes we have even played without a setlist, which is our ultimate goal.

How do you channel the same live energy when recording material? 
Silvia: We’re working specifically on this at the moment. We always recorded the songs first and then figured out how to play them live, and then they evolved into different versions, which is what you see live of the songs already released. Next record(s) will be the opposite, we are playing the songs live a lot and then we’ll record them in a studio, sort of what rock bands do. Also we’ll play the rhythms by hand as much as possible, we think this will make the records much more raw and energetic.

Finally, we are named after the biggest selling single of 2001 and so, just for laughs, we always ask what is your favourite Mariah Carey song?
Both: We don’t know Mariah Carey, but we love (unironically) the American anthem sung by Whithney Houston, and we don’t even like the American anthem in particular but her performance is just amazing.

Dame Area’s Toda la mentira sobre Dame Area is out now
Catch the band live in concert this summer
Bandcamp / Instagram / Spotify