Interview with Golden Salt: ‘We want our feeling for classical-rock metal to be very modern’

Florence, Italy-based unique, classical-rock duo Golden Salt will release their debut album, Iron Feathers, later this month (April), which will include some of their own compositions for the first time, in addition to covers of popular songs.

Golden Salt comprises Arianna Mazzarese on violin and Eleonora Loi on electric guitar. Ari graduated in violin from the prestigious L. Cherubini Conservatory of Florence and Ele grew up with folk-rock in Sardinia. Initially they were called The Price of Salt in homage to the novel by Patricia Highsmith of the same name before becoming Golden Salt: ‘Salt is a metaphor for pleasure, it is what makes things tastier, but often there is a price to pay for enjoying a good thing,’ Ari said.

They met as physics undergraduates in Florence, although they have been working on their music full-time for the past year. ‘We were on the same course, Ele helped me with geometry,’ Ari said. ‘We didn’t know we were both musicians!’ Ele is nodding: ‘We come from different lives and places but we told each other what music we liked.’ Ari is laughing: ‘She said “I like AC/DC” and I said who are they?!’

Their musical collaboration got underway when they started busking outside the university in 2014 and performing at private events in the city. ‘That’s when we started to classify ourselves as classical-rock,’ Ari explained. Ele jumps in: ‘At the beginning when I started to study physics in Florence, I only had my small acoustic guitar and I thought I needed an electric one, so I bought one in a second hand shop.’ It turns out that she’s talking about the beautiful black guitar that features in many of their videos. ‘Wait, I’ll show you,’ she said, before disappearing for a few seconds and then coming back with the guitar in question, an Ibanez Jem. I tell her that it looks incredible in the videos, with its mother of pearl pick guard that shimmers and catches the light, making it look as if it is encrusted with tiny stones. In fact, Ele was so taken with its design that she has since been inspired to start working with a local artisan guitar maker to customise guitars, which they will start selling later this year.

‘We’ve just started writing original songs but this is our future’

Iron Feathers will feature nine covers and three original compositions by them. ‘We called it ‘iron’ because we have that metal inside us and ‘feathers’ are soft, they’re the acoustic sound of the album,’ Ari said. ‘We’ve just started writing original music. On this album, all the pieces are instrumental, although we have also written songs with lyrics about human rights violations and against nuclear weapons but our soul is mainly instrumental at the moment. The universal character of instrumental music is the best way we have now to communicate to the world, far removed from language and culture differences. Our three new ones are an experiment, one is electronic.’ One of the original tracks, ‘The Fortress’, was written for a commission by the Fortezza delle Verrucole (a Tuscan fortress, as the title suggests) and was released as a single in 2019. The song gets a makeover on the upcoming album to include ‘a little touch of modern beats’ as Ari put it. It’s incredibly haunting and, unusually, starts with just two chords from Ele before Ari comes in on the violin. However, it’s when they play in unison that the song becomes something else entirely, sounding almost medieval as the melody sweeps you along. The album will also feature the power ballad, ‘Ballad of the Crow’ as well as their cover of the Games Of Thrones’ theme music. ‘There is not a specific theme that links the covers we’ve chosen, just the same feeling they bring to us when we play them together,’ Ari said.

Interestingly, it was their cover of Metallica’s ‘Nothing Else Matters’ that brought them to a wider audience. ‘It’s my favourite, we love to play it together,’ Ari said. Their version of it is much slower and more pared back than Metallica’s heavier live version of the track and actually makes you appreciate how lovely the underlying harmony is, not least because its melancholic undertones come through more sharply when played on the violin. Ele agrees: ‘I love it so much, I feel something particular as well for ‘Fear of the Dark’ (Iron Maiden). It’s very simple, there’s no additional production, it’s very pure.’

They filmed their video for ‘Nothing Else Matters’ in a marble quarry in the mountains in northern Tuscany. ‘It was a very cool experience, we directed it,’ Ari said. ‘We chose to do this song, it wasn’t popular but we liked playing it together. It was terribly cold, it was November. It changed our life, it went viral, it reached people.’ (It’s been viewed 9.5 million times on YouTube since it came out in November 2019). Ele says that Ari had a vision for the video of ‘something white, sensitive’ and the unexpected weather conditions added to its somewhat ethereal atmosphere: ‘When we arrived at the top of the mountain, we didn’t expect so much fog!,’ Ele laughed. ‘Then the sun came out, I don’t feel well with the sun, and the fog came down, it’s very suggestive. It didn’t go as we expected!’ Ari joins in: ‘It’s very atmospheric, it’s hard to find cool places to shoot our videos, we spend a lot of time looking for them!’ A different quarry crops up in their video to ‘Black Feather’.

‘This album is the end of one evolution’

Now, they are looking for ways to expand on their existing distinctive sound. I tell them that I can’t think of anyone else doing what they do, either in terms of the covers that straddle classical music and rock music or, indeed, of anyone else who mashes up classical composers such as Pachelbel with Green Day in such a seamless way that even when you know both pieces, you have to listen incredibly hard to notice when they switch back and forth from one piece to the other. This seems to really please them and they become very animated: ‘We’re searching for new sounds and a new way,’ Ele said. ‘We want our feeling for classical rock metal to be very modern, this album is the end of one evolution.’

I ask them whether they think their music could be a gateway to classical music for people who haven’t had much exposure to it but who love rock music and they both nod enthusiastically: ‘Yes, definitely,’ Ele said. ‘Some of our listeners have told us that they didn’t used to like classical music but our music has made them like it more.’ As a classically trained musician, Ari is conscious of the difficulty of condensing longer, more complex pieces of classical music into the length of a typical pop song: ‘It’s like trying to write a novel in a Facebook post, you can’t communicate it in the same way, so you have to try to adapt it, to try to find new ways of telling your story,’ she said.

In their videos, they are the epitome of rocky badasses and when I tell them this, they laugh and agree. I ask if it’s hard to present yourself like that in a country that is as conservative as Italy can often be and in an industry where many women come under pressure to look a certain way to sell records and they both nod: ‘We have some problems related to this,’ Ari admitted. ‘We get sexist comments under our videos. It hurts us when these comments are sexist. Some men disliked our ‘Hallelujah’ video because of my shirt, it really hurts me. Imagine Dragons do the same thing and no-one says anything.’ (In the video in question, Ari is wearing a shirt that is unbuttoned all the way, although clearly fixed in place.)

The sexism isn’t confined to their videos, either. Despite having taken courses to improve their sound engineering skills, they still feel sidelined at times for being women: ‘In our experience, the courses we took to improve our technical skills were always clearly aimed at a male audience but even when we go to play, we often find ourselves in absurd situations with people who assume that there is a man behind our activities, as if we were puppets to be exhibited and managed by a man,’ Ari said. ‘We know well the amazement of people who discover that behind us there is only ourselves. Or we meet people who, when they see see two young women with their instruments in hand, give us unsolicited advice about how to use them, which we already know, it’s our job! The other insinuation we get is that our success is related to how we look rather than our skills. We get inappropriate comments in person and online where a man will say “I take/prefer the guitarist (or the violinist) because blah blah blah”. Are there really people who think it’s ok to “take” a woman who has never told you they want to be taken?’

‘There’s violence against women every day in Italy’

The problems they’ve faced are part of a widespread problem in Italy, according to Ele: ‘I’m sure I see that sexism inside the mind of almost all people, men and women, stereotypes are everywhere, we have to try to be the right people. We did a video to support “Stop Violence Against Women”, it’s important to be strong. There’s violence against women every day in Italy, physical and psychological. We have to fight against it before it becomes physical, otherwise it’s too late. When I was a child, I already felt the discrimination because I wasn’t allowed to play football with the boys. My friends wanted to play with me and the priest prevented me on the grounds that I was a girl. In the country where I was born, no-one came forward to defend a little child who just wanted to play football with her friends. Today, this happens less often but there are still many problems and it is our job to step forward.’ Ari interjects: ‘She wants to be a strong woman, that’s natural for her, I’m not a strong woman.’ Ele joins in: ‘Many people tell me “It’s not right that women be so strong”. In some of our videos (such as ‘Nothing Else Matters’), we have dirt on our faces and some men say that it’s not ok for women to be dirty like this. One man wrote that he was scared of me!’ I tell her I call that a win and they both laugh. They both say ‘it would be a dream come true’ to hear one of their pieces of music in a film about human rights.

Storytelling plays a big role in their videos, which comes across strongly in their cover of ‘Sweet Dreams (Are Made of This)’ by The Eurythmics, where they play the piece in the rain. It’s sexy and energetic and takes the song in an entirely different direction, it’s far rockier and more urgent than the original: ‘It was the first production we did ourselves and we wanted to represent something bold,’ Ari said. ‘The song itself is very cool. In the video we have the master/slave dynamic going on between the guitar and the violin. The violin is less powerful so I am the weaker one!’ (She is dominated by Ele in the video.)

For me, one of their most impressive pieces is their ‘Star Wars Medley’, which blends various pieces of music from the original three films, including the iconic main theme, to sound fresh, haunting and extremely suspenseful. Their take on ‘The Imperial March (Darth Vader’s theme)’ is more frightening than John Williams’ original for me: ‘The fan of Star Wars is Ari, I didn’t know it as a child,’ Ele explained. Ari is smiling: ‘I did, I watched it on repeat, I played it in the orchestra at the academy a few years ago, the Star Wars Suite. Our cover is shorter. I asked Ele “Please do it, I love it so much.” Ele is smiling: ‘ When she played it with the orchestra, I was there listening, so I feel honoured to play it with her. I finally decided to play it with her when Ari said “You can play the march!”.’

‘We built everything with our hands, it took us several days!’

Sometimes, their videos can be deceptive. ‘Canon Rock’, which mashes up Pachelbel and Green Day, appears to be filmed in an Italian villa but isn’t: ‘There are lots of villas in Tuscany but they’re so expensive to rent!,’ Ari said. ‘So we just filmed the outside of one and the scene inside was filmed in a room in my mum’s house, we completely redecorated it!’ (To look like a stately home.) Ele is laughing: ‘We built everything with our hands, it took us several days!’ ‘Yes and after my mum said she wanted it to stay like that!,’ Ari said.

When it comes to picking a song to cover, the rule is that one of them has to really like the song. Ele admits she’s not very keen on ‘Hallelujah’: ‘The coolest songs end up being the ones we both like, I learned a lesson about that,’ Ari said. ‘A few years ago, I wanted to reach people with our music, so we did a cover of Maroon 5’s ‘Girls Like You’ but I didn’t like it, so I stopped doing songs I didn’t like. It doesn’t work if your heart isn’t in it.’

In Florence, Ele is a big fan of folk rock band, Bandabardò: ‘Their lyrics tell something important, about issues such as discrimination,’ she said. ‘Also, I like Gianna Nannini in Siena, she’s rocky. I like a rock band in Sardinia, Kenze Neke, they changed their name and became Askra. For me, when I started playing guitar, I liked it when folk and rock metal came together. That raw sound influenced me so much. I love the distortion of the electric guitar. You can buy big pedals with many sounds but the first year with Ari, I only used one pedal! I like the contrast between that heavy pedal and the soft violin.’ Ari, for her part, says ‘there’s so much beauty in classical music’: ‘I prefer Schubert, Bach, Vivaldi and Chopin. I love how they mastered their compositions and their harmonies. Now, I like rock very much as well, so in the future, I want to find new types of beauty. If you think about it, Mozart and Schubert would write very differently if they were here today. We want to celebrate them by creating new kinds of sounds with their music.’