Formula Indie Sessions _ Interview with Post

PoST are an Italian indie band active since 2001. The name “PoST” came first, and only later was playfully expanded into “Proud of Serving Tuna”.

Over time, PoST shifted their songwriting from Italian into English, while keeping one song in Italian on every album — treating language as a narrative choice rather than a boundary.

They have been described as “a band that doesn’t rely on a single effective track, but on an effectiveness spread across tracks, delivering on its promise from the very first note.”

Proud of Serving Tuna are Gio, Davide, Antonio and Daniele.

What is your earliest memory connected to music?

We have several things in mind, but the most significative are childhood memories.

Thinking about a father listening to 70s old record on Sunday morning, or a brother playing drums, another father with mandoline, the very first music show attended…

These first experiences in touch with music, somehow pushed us to get in touch with a guitar, a synthesizer, percussion… whatever that can eventually make a good sound.

How did your passion for creating music begin?

Even though we grew up in different periods between the 1980s and 2010s, our region was seeing a strong movement of musical artists.

Many of our peers were starting to release records, and thanks to the frequent opportunities to interact with many of them, each of us began to feel the desire to express something that hadn’t yet been created.

A guitar riff, a drum beat, we all had something to bring to a context already crowded with bands and singer-songwriters.

The ease of meeting in the city context, in many spaces dedicated to music, led us to connect with each other.

What’s the story behind your current music project?

Our story began many years ago, crossing from different musicians’ fellows. After several experiences we found an ideal band’s line-up with Gio, Davide, Antonio and Gigi. In that time PoST published two albums and had a lot of live shows either in our birth city, Torino, and further away in Italy.

Then, we had to greet Gigi and welcome Daniele, who supported a lot in our recent story with a brand new sounds equipment – the keyboards.

We spent a very long time to find a total new arrangement, and proven songwriting experience that we put at service to our latest album, Ten Little Indies.

How would you describe your sound to someone who has never heard your music before?

The sound we adopted in current lineup comes from a distinctive songwriting, through unconventional arrangements: we like to balance catchy melodies with singular harmonic progressions, creating a sound that feels familiar and off-center at the same time.

What is one thing you’ve learned that completely changed the way you make music?

The opportunity that technology brought in decades taught us how to fix a melody on a tape before, and an audio file then.

This progress, once very expensive and reserved at professional entities in the beginning, very soon became always more affordable and we started to learn the basic techniques to produce our own music: there was a strong, new way to approach the songwriting and this helped us in a constant growth by skills, in both technical and musical ones.

What tools, instruments, or software are essential in your creative process?

As we grew up in songwriting and production processes, we had to face several technologies: from computers to audio workstation softwares, we used them a lot as we learned to record and mix our own material. This helped working of many songs during remote sessions.

But, one of our favourite way to write down our best songs is still meeting at our little studio and play together.

Maintaining both new and old methods allows us to fully express ourselves.

Which indie artist or song are you loving right now?

We have very different musical backgrounds, so let’s just name someone: Djo, Radiohead, Iosonouncane, Tame Impala…

How have your personal experiences influenced your music and artistic vision?

Most of our songs are based on personal experiences, or someone’s close to us. We kept some personal experience and put ourselves in their position at a certain point of their life, or event, trying to describe the mood, or the emotional flow is happening.

Often, we also try to emphasize those feelings through the musical arrangement: but, sometimes, we also try to “deceive” the listener going to a musical mood which isn’t adherent to the storytelling, to stimulate our music listening in a more innovative way.

What emotions or messages do you hope listeners take from your work?

Relating to our artistic visions, we’d like to stimulate our listeners to deeply understand the messages coming from our works’ lyrics.

We firmly think that people hear a lot but don’t really listen. So, putting high attention to highlight a personal feeling with a certain melodic tune, has to lead the listener to overthink about this or that verse.

Also, we try to treasure our personal musical influences to somehow tell them “hey, if you’re connoisseur of this musical mood, focus more on what we mean”.

 What’s the most important lesson music has taught you so far?

Many of us learned in years, that the pleasure of write songs, melodies, and arrangements are so precious that worth to be shared with an audience.

Many people, in last decades, seem trying to aspire to create the most hitting single to reach the top of the chart, with very good productions – even underestimating the meaning of their opera.

We’d prefer to have a sincere comment about just one element of a song of ours by someone present at our show, instead having millions of streams on platforms.

What is a dream venue or festival you would love to perform at?

One of our favourite dream venues are Primavera Sound and Glastonbury festivals.

If you could collaborate with any artist, past or present, who would it be and why?

Don’t have a particular subject in mind, but someone’s sharing our focus on songwriting and music production.

About the big names we can mention Bowie, Björk, Zappa. Looking for most contemporary ones, first keeping in mind are King Gizzard & Lizard Wizard, Alt-J, Mac DeMarco.

Where can our listeners follow and support your music? (Website,Spotify, IG, links)

We just suggest to point at our mainframe www.postmusic.it in order to choose anyone’s preferred platform: from Spotify to Youtube through Bandcamp, we made a lot of work to be reachable through many channels.

Looking toward the future, what’s your dream for the next chapter of your musical journey?

We would produce new material to be listened by the most outside of our country, hopefully reaching foreign places, to share our live-played music ideas to people who never heard of us.

What do you hope listeners will discover about you along the way?

Hope that one day, someone could come and ask something very strange – like “why you put that choir away from the lyrics?” or “did you really played half tune down all these years?” [laughing]

Being serious, we expect listeners developed more knowledge of what music making consists of: duty, effort, time-investment and the joy of being creative. These are human values that we believe in, and really hope all of us could apply in their daily life.

If you want here you can add a representative Youtube video to insert below the interview 🙂

Here is our latest video release, which has been filmed and produced by ourselves. It resulted in a self-humor performance of Proud of Serving Tuna, playing one of our songs after literally intruding into our friend’s house – everyone had really broken nothing! 😉