𝙊𝙪𝙧’ 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙠 𝘽𝙮 𝙏𝙧𝙖𝙘𝙠’ 𝙜𝙪𝙞𝙙𝙚 𝙨𝙝𝙚𝙙𝙨 𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩 𝙤𝙣 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙩𝙤𝙧𝙞𝙚𝙨 𝙗𝙚𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙙 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚 𝙤𝙛 𝙤𝙪𝙧 𝙛𝙖𝙫𝙤𝙪𝙧𝙞𝙩𝙚 𝙖𝙧𝙩𝙞𝙨𝙩𝙨’ 𝙢𝙪𝙨𝙞𝙘.
We love pulling back the curtain on the stories and inspirations behind intriguing new releases. It’s always fascinating to hear the personal anecdotes, creative processes, and little-known tales that shaped each track. These insights not only deepen our appreciation for the artistry behind these musical gems but also help us connect with the artists.
On CCCC, Italian singer-songwriter Chiara Civello and producer Cristiano Crisci, known as Clap! Clap!, discover a shared language in unexpected territory. Sparked by Civello’s fascination with Crisci’s 2020 album Liquid Portraits, the project began with instrumental sketches traded back and forth, eventually blooming into a ten-track conversation between jazz songcraft and exploratory club production.
The inaugural release on Civello’s Quarter Moon Records, the album moves at an unhurried, magnetic pace. It wanders through slow-mo house, broken beat, sultry R&B, and acoustic textures, connecting Sicily, Central Africa, Brazil, and the Americas. Anchored by guest contributions from percussionist Mauro Refosco, pianist Dario Bassolino, and drummer Stefano Costanzo, the tracks create an open atmosphere where Civello’s airy vocals can truly breathe. Thematically, the writing draws on literary voices like Clarice Lispector and Emily Dickinson to explore loss, family heritage, and healing. Rather than trying to outrun grief, the songs invite it in to dance, finding steady rhythm in vulnerability.
Crisci describes the record as ‘a perfectly calm sea’, music that asks the listener to slow down and settle into the details. Civello and Crisci pull back the curtain on the quiet memories, studio instincts, and emotional currents that shape each track.
Stream the album below, but first, check out Civello’s and Crisci’s exclusive track-by-track guides.
Chiara Civello & Clap! Clap! | The Stories Behind the Songs
By Chiara Civello | A Few Words Before Listening
When Cristiano started sending me his music, I found myself in unfamiliar territory. His tracks followed their own logic, guided by rhythm, texture, and unexpected turns. I could hear songs inside them, but they weren’t always where I expected them to be.
Sometimes I had to take something from the end and bring it to the beginning. Sometimes a melody arrived before I understood what I was singing about. I would improvise, let the recordings settle for a while, then return to them and discover what had been hiding there. Cristiano and I kept up a constant ping-pong of files, reshaping the music along the way. The greatest challenge, and perhaps the most exciting part, was finding a song form within these extraordinary sonic landscapes without losing their freedom. Looking back, I realize how much of this record came from following things I didn’t fully understand yet.
01. ME AND THE TREES
This is where everything began. The first song Cristiano and I wrote together. He sent me a track built around a traditional grinding song performed by Tonga women from Southern Africa. There was something about the rattling sound, the voices, the rhythm of their work, that gave me an almost physical sense of imprisonment. At the time, I was experiencing one of the most painful forms of emotional punishment: the silent treatment, repeatedly inflicted on me by someone I loved. I began improvising over those voices, and somehow a song about freedom emerged. About remaining fragile without being destroyed. About growing older without growing harder. I wanted to learn how to dance with the storms, like the trees.
02. A JURNATA
Cristiano sent me this hypnotic, percussion-driven track, with a single harmonic drone running through it. It reminded me of the extraordinary washerwomen’s chorus in Roberto De Simone’s La Gatta Cenerentola. Something ancient, communal, almost ritualistic. I immediately knew I wanted to sing in Sicilian. Not long afterwards, I found myself in Sicily, sitting by the sea with my cousin Mattea Musso, a wonderful classical singer, and I asked her to write the lyrics with me. Fishermen returning without fish. A thirsty land. A day passing. Love. The images arrived as though they had always been there. Mattea and I recorded our voices together at my home, like a little chorus. Later, in New York, Mauro Refosco added a percussion solo that opened up another dimension of the song.
03. NEW DIMENSION
I saw the light before I heard the melody. Cristiano’s rhythm made me imagine the first sunlight of the morning passing through a rotating crystal, scattering tiny fragments of light everywhere. Little dancing rainbows. That’s what the music felt like to me. A new world opening up, full of angles, reflections, possibilities. I started singing instinctively, without trying to explain any of it. Sometimes the best thing you can do with a new dimension is simply enter it.
04. CLARICE MY DEAR
I wanted to write a letter to Clarice Lispector. I was living through what I can only describe as a hemorrhage of conflicting feelings. I kept thinking about Clarice, about the way she could walk straight into the most frightening corners of being human and somehow find light there. The song began almost as a cry for help. And then this line appeared, as though the answer had been there all along:
“I’m in love with the abyss I am made of.”
Musically, I followed certain suggestions in Cristiano’s harmonies and let my voice drift into an almost cinematic landscape. Only later, listening back, did I recognize an echo of Edda Dell’Orso, my very first singing teacher when I was fourteen. I doubt she even remembers me.
05. THE WAY OUT IS THE WAY IN
I found the beginning of this song at the end. Cristiano’s original track was almost entirely in a major key. But towards the end, the groove started falling apart, the harmony moved into minor, and suddenly I heard the possibility of a verse. So I took that ending and brought it forward. The darker section became the verse, opening into the major-key refrain. Around that time, my mother was passing me books by the Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh. His teachings were also something I shared with my dear friend Alabaster DePlume. We were both going through difficult moments in our lives, holding each other’s hands from a distance. The way out is the way in. I wasn’t singing it because I had figured anything out. I was singing it because I needed to remember.
06. DO YOU NEED IT TOO
I wrote this song while a relationship was falling apart, and I was still desperately trying to save it. I think I was more attached to our story than to myself. I kept asking whether the other person still needed that love, that closeness, that thing we had once been together. But what I was really asking for, over and over again, was validation. Dario Bassolino later enriched Cristiano’s harmonies with a tension that moved me deeply. Something in those chords made the song vibrate differently inside me.
Looking back, I think the question I was really asking was:
Do you see me too?
07. MY GRIEF AND I
Cristiano’s beat felt like shifting sands.
Nothing stayed still. Everything seemed to be moving, breaking, rearranging itself.
I kept hearing one word.
Broken.
I imagined a room destroyed by anger. Broken windows, shattered pieces everywhere. Not a real room, but one I could see very clearly. And there I was, dancing alone in the middle of the wreckage. With my grief. There’s something almost absurd about that image, but it made perfect sense to me. I also came across a Ghanaian radio programme, with people talking, and brought a fragment of their voices into the track. I wanted another human presence moving through the wreckage.
08. KISS YOU
A black box. Smoke everywhere. A dance floor. That was the first thing I saw when I heard Cristiano’s track. I imagined myself dancing, watching someone I wanted to kiss. In the morning. Bodies and silhouettes appearing and disappearing in the darkness. That wonderful moment when nothing has happened yet, but everything might. The melody came out of improvisation. I shaped it afterwards, but I wanted to keep its original impulse. Sometimes a song doesn’t need to solve anything. Sometimes it just wants to kiss somebody.
09. SEARCHING
Cristiano’s daughter Greta had been playing with a marimba, and her playing was already part of the track he sent me. There was something wonderfully playful about it. It transported me somewhere I couldn’t quite name.
I started singing:
Searching, searching…
I didn’t know exactly what I was looking for.
And then I realized that perhaps I didn’t need to know.
The song itself was the search.
10. TUDO PASSA
When I first heard Cristiano’s track, all I could see was cinema. I imagined an instrumental piece, an imaginary film score, with my voice moving through it in the spirit of Edda Dell’Orso. I already had Emily Dickinson’s If You Were Coming in the Fall in mind. I chose just four lines, the ones in which she imagines giving up this life for the certainty of eternity with the person she loves.
And then came the words:
Tudo passa.
Everything passes.
I wasn’t trying to make a philosophical statement or explain Dickinson.
It simply came to me that way.
Chiara Civello & Clap! Clap! | The Stories Behind the Songs
By Clap! Clap! | A Few Words Before Listening
When I work on a track, I rarely start with a song in the traditional sense. I like building little sonic worlds, bringing together rhythms, voices, instruments, and recordings from different places and contexts, often without knowing exactly where they will take me. With CCCC, I tried to create a space that Chiara could enter freely, without having to follow a predetermined structure. The tracks were open landscapes, full of possibilities, and our work together was above all an exercise in listening: understanding where the music wanted to go, allowing ourselves to be surprised, and finding a balance each time between what I had imagined and what emerged from her voice. It was fascinating to see how sounds that, for me, were purely rhythmic or timbral could become something else through her melodies and words. I didn’t always know what I was looking for when I began a track. Often, that was precisely the beauty of it.
01. ME AND THE TREES
This track already existed in an early instrumental form on my album Liquid Portraits. It was a sonic landscape that had already found its own identity, but still held possibilities I hadn’t explored. When Chiara began singing over that music, something special happened. It was the first piece we made together, the one that allowed us to connect artistically and discover how each of us worked. From that moment, the track began to transform. We revisited it, modified it and refined it, letting the voice open up new directions and the production evolve around the song. The contributions of Dario Bassolino on synth and Stefano Costanzo on drums, both brought in by Chiara, also added new colours and another instrumental dimension. For me, Me and the Trees represents exactly that: the moment when an idea born in my musical world became something new through an encounter with another sensibility. It was the starting point for the whole record.
02. A JURNATA
With this track, I wanted to explore a sonic territory connected to the Mediterranean and the rhythmic traditions of southern Italy. I was interested in starting from rhythm, building a pulse that felt ancient and familiar, then experimenting with the sounds and taking it somewhere personal. My aim wasn’t to recreate a tradition literally, but to absorb some of its suggestions and transform them through my electronic language. I was looking for a balance between the physical force of percussion and an essential sonic space, where just a few elements could develop an almost hypnotic movement. Then Chiara and Mattea Musso came in and chose to sing in Sicilian, giving the music an even deeper connection to the land and its memory. Mauro Refosco’s percussion solo added another burst of energy, taking the piece towards a freer, more instinctive dimension. It was wonderful to see an idea born from rhythmic exploration turn into a song with its own identity, capable of bringing electronic experimentation, voices and tradition together.
03. NEW DIMENSION
I like to think of music as a change in perspective: shifting a single element, finding an unexpected combination, or changing how we listen to a sound can open a door to something new. On this track, I followed instinct above all, working with movement and the possibility of creating a space that wasn’t completely defined. I wanted to let the elements transform into one another without imposing too rigid a direction. The beautiful thing is that Chiara immediately found her own imagery within it, full of light, reflections and new possibilities. That’s one of the things I love about this project: discovering that the same music can contain very different worlds, depending on who enters it.
04. CLARICE MY DEAR
In this production, I wanted to work on the relationship between harmony, atmosphere and voice, letting the music suggest an imaginary world without defining it completely. I often try to build tracks with something cinematic about them, where sounds do more than support a melody: they help create an emotional environment. Working with Chiara took the track in a new direction. Her voice found its own place within the sonic landscape, while the harmonies began to engage more and more closely with the words. Here, too, we expanded the production with Dario Bassolino on synth and Stefano Costanzo on drums. Their contributions added an instrumental dimension that enriched the dialogue between the electronic and the played elements. I like to think that a production is never truly finished until it meets the right people. Sometimes the contribution of other musicians is enough to reveal possibilities that were already there in the music, just waiting to be discovered.
05. THE WAY OUT IS THE WAY IN
This song is a great example of how important it is, in a collaboration, to be willing to question your own ideas. I had made two different beats, without necessarily imagining they could become parts of the same song. Chiara sensed a possibility I hadn’t considered: she took elements from both tracks, combined them and built a structure in which the two parts could speak to each other, creating contrasts and openings. It was interesting to see how the original material changed meaning through a new arrangement. It wasn’t simply a matter of adding a melody to a beat, but of rethinking the very form of the production. Here as well, the work continued with Dario Bassolino on synth and Stefano Costanzo on drums, enriching the structure with new instrumental elements. This is one of the things I enjoyed most about working with Chiara: never treating a track as untouchable. Sometimes a different path from the one you imagined is exactly what leads you to the best result.
06. DO YOU NEED IT TOO
This production reminded me how much harmony can change the emotional weight of a piece. Sometimes a rhythmic structure can seem stable, almost reassuring, yet simply changing how the chords move within it can bring out a completely different tension. Dario Bassolino’s work on the harmonies added a perspective that enriched the track, creating new nuances without losing the connection to my original idea. Chiara’s voice gave that tension a clear direction. It was a process in which each contribution shifted the balance slightly, until we found a form capable of holding both the fragility and the intensity of the song.
07. MY GRIEF AND I
When I build a beat, I like to think of rhythm as something alive, not necessarily stable or predictable. It can be solid ground to move on, but also a surface that keeps shifting beneath your feet, challenging the way we listen. On this track, I wanted to work with precisely that feeling of instability, allowing the elements to transform and reassemble without losing their energy. Chiara’s addition of voices from a Ghanaian radio programme brings another presence into the music. A voice recorded elsewhere can travel across time and space, enter a completely new context and become part of a different story, without entirely losing the memory of where it came from. With Chiara’s voice, these elements found a new balance. The result is an encounter between different sonic fragments that together create a landscape greater than the sum of its parts.
08. KISS YOU
I love it when a track can suggest an image without having to describe it. You don’t always need to tell a story from beginning to end: sometimes a groove, an atmosphere and a particular quality of movement are enough to evoke a place, a situation or a precise moment. In this production, I wanted to leave room for that imaginative dimension, keeping the music open and allowing the voice to gradually define its character. Chiara found a very spontaneous direction, preserving something of the immediacy of improvisation in the melody.
I particularly appreciate that: when an idea is born instinctively, it often contains a vitality that can be lost if you try to make it too perfect.
09. SEARCHING
This track contains something very personal: a little marimba performance by my daughter Greta, which was already part of the music I sent Chiara. I like working with sounds that carry a story, even when they happen by chance or far from a recording studio. A home recording, a found fragment, a voice or an instrument played without any particular intention can have a quality that’s difficult to recreate artificially. Here, that element helped give the track a playful, unpredictable dimension. When Chiara began singing, the music found a new direction without losing the spontaneity of the original material. The piece grew further through Dario Bassolino’s contributions on synth and Stefano Costanzo’s on drums, adding new shades to the production while keeping the spontaneous character of the original Idea alive. It’s a good example of how I often work: I start with something small, perhaps seemingly marginal, and try to see how far it can go. You don’t always know what you’re looking for when you begin. Sometimes the creative process itself reveals it.
10. TUDO PASSA
When I work on a production, I like to imagine that music can exist outside the song form, too. I often think about cinema, about the images a sequence of sounds can evoke, about a scene that doesn’t actually exist but takes shape in the listener’s mind. With this track, I wanted to leave space for a narrative dimension without defining too clearly what the music was supposed to tell. I wanted the sonic elements to suggest images and sensations while retaining a certain freedom of interpretation. Chiara’s vision met this approach, taking the production even closer to an imaginary film score. Her use of the voice, together with the literary influences that inspired the lyrics, gave the music a new perspective. The production was also enriched by Dario Bassolino on synth and Stefano Costanzo on drums, who added new nuances to the sonic texture. I like the idea that a song can contain something without necessarily having to explain it. Music, like Images and memories, changes meaning depending on when we encounter it. And perhaps it’s precisely that ability to transform that keeps it alive.
