By Ben Madden.
About a year ago, Australian/Italian rapper DoloRRes made a move that flies in the face of conventional music industry wisdom. Over the preceding few years, DoloRRes had made a name for himself locally off the back of a string of woozy, off-beat hip-hop releases. These were frequently paired with high-concept, D.I.Y. music videos created as part of Almanac, a film production company he co-founded with Renee Kypriotis. Like the vast majority of Australian rappers, his music was exclusively in boring ol’ English.
When you take a big artistic swing, you’ve gotta hit a home run. Changing up a formula that’s working for you is always risky. However, when DoloRRes stepped up to the plate to release BOSCO, he turned into prime Barry Bonds — his performance enhanced by weed and Disarronno rather than anabolic steroids (or so I assume, you can never be sure). BOSCO has a melancholic-but-club-ready energy that is immediately captivating, and DoloRRes is rapping like he’s got Barry Plant breathing down his neck. The track turned out to be the lead single off the five-piece EP REAL LIFE MUSIC, which he released back in January, and is a taster for what’s to come from DoloRRes in 2024. Of course, you’d be forgiven for not exactly understanding what DoloRRes was rapping about on BOSCO. Save for a couple of bars, he raps and sings the whole thing in Italian.
Born in Italy before moving to Australia as a child, he’s now made the move back to the motherland, and speaking to him, he’s the most creatively dialed in he’s ever been. There’s a palpable hunger throughout REAL LIFE MUSIC, and DoloRRes is compelling listeners to move their body. BOSCO is a dancefloor filler, and switching up the language of his vocals has opened up a whole new world of lyricism for DoloRRes — though you’ll have to do a bit of digging to work out what he’s saying. REAL LIFE MUSIC is almost exclusively in Italian, meaning that unless you speak the language, you have to feel what DoloRRes is rapping about. Lines like “Son’ universale come il sale, come olio, come aceto” on GUANCIALE translate to “I am universal like salt, like oil, like vinegar” — it’s the type of dancefloor poetry you’re likely to hear when a few pints turn your mate into a modern-day philosopher.
BOSCO was my song of 2023, and REAL LIFE MUSIC will no doubt feature on my projects of the year list come December. DoloRRes is back in Melbourne for a tour/pair of shows in Sydney/Melbourne (more on that later), and I wanted to speak to the man behind the music. On behalf of Dog Scraps, I caught up with DoloRRes in Melbourne producer Eleftherios’ studio — many thanks to him for helping make this chat happen. What followed was a conversation about learning to be less cynical, making music videos on cracked versions of Adobe products, and road rules in Australia and Italy.
BM: Firstly, congratulations on the release of Real Life Music! It’s been out for a little while now. How are you feeling about having shared it with the world?
DoloRRes: I’m just happy it’s out and I can just move on to the next thing. I mean, in all honesty it was meant to come out a while ago. So I’ve kind of already mentally checked out. But I’m good that it’s out of the way, good to do these shows. Yeah, everything else is gonna drop this year. It’s gonna be like 10 times more interesting.
What held it up?
Label issues.
They’re now resolved?
I’m no longer with them, so yes.
That’s SameSame, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, okay. Interesting.
Not due to any dispute, this EP was the last record I had to hand in for the contract, so it just took a while to come out because of, you know, delays. I mean, for God’s sake, BOSCO came out about a year ago. It’s a five track EP, we didn’t want to make it any longer, because we’re saving all the wild shit for what’s dropping this year. Real Life Music is almost like a preview tape. It’s a prologue. It’s an entree.
It’s also your first project rapping in Italian. I’m curious to find out why the switch happened from English to Italian. Was that always on the cards, or did something inspire it?
It’s something that people have been trying to get me to do for a while for obvious reasons, and I’ve never really liked Australian rap music that much– sorry, Italian rap music — well, either — but Italian rap music just because it’s very, like, American. It just felt cringe hearing, like, Italian boom bap. But then I got into Italian drill, and for some reason that made a lot of sense, and it just works. So, hearing that being done, I was like okay, maybe I could do this in a way that doesn’t sound garbage.
Then I had to play this rave and I had no dance music. So I had to make a bunch of songs in like a week, and one of those songs was BOSCO. I just thought ‘fuck it, let me just try this one in Italian.’ Originally, the chorus was in English and then the verses were in Italian, and then I just made the whole thing Italian.
The EP, Real Life Music, what was supposed to be that EP for the contract, it was meant to be in English. It was completely different. It had synth pop on it, and disco, and it had all these other different genres. And then we were just like, ‘Let’s just make a switch, and go with the Italian thing.’ It felt fresh, and it felt new, and it just felt consistent, because the issue is that my music up until recently — well, always — has been very inconsistent, in the sense where I just kind of fucking bounce around so much. So, doing the thing in Italian kind of forced me to lock into one sound and one voice almost. It’s now to the point when I go to the studio, I can just turn the mic on. I don’t write lyrics anymore, I don’t do that. I just turn on the mic and I have a voice, a sound that I know that I have that sounds good. And so it’s been really lit to just make music knowing kind of what I’m going to make from the get go instead of trying to make any genre under the sun.
It’s giving you that through line.
Yeah. And also, I’m just sick of — I just fucking said enough shit in English. I’ve been making music for like 10 years. So it’s like I just run out of shit to say, and I’ll probably get tired of Italian soon. I don’t know, probably give it like a few more years and I’ll do something else.
Learn Spanish or something.
I’ve been trying to learn Spanish. Obviously, AORA is kind of in Spanish. I don’t know, the Italian thing’s something where I was just like, ‘You know what, let me just do one thing for once.’ And it just happened to be that. Now I don’t make music in English anymore. So nothing that comes out this year will be in English. And it won’t be in English for a very long time. Until I say that it is.
We were speaking before about how you moved back over to Italy, but your audience is primarily here in Australia —
For now.
Exactly. I’m interested then, because there are other groups that we can mention like 1300 who rap in Korean. Do you feel any internal pressure switching from English to Italian because a lot of your audience won’t understand what you’re saying anymore?
I mean, obviously, [it’s] a bit of a handicap in the sense of like, again, Spotify is not going to fuck with it. People don’t know what I’m saying, and yeah, those are the main two factors. But, regardless of that, I’ve already made this decision. I feel like it would be more harmful to my career to switch my sound up again now, than to just go full force into what I’m doing. And also I have belief that the lyrics are irrelevant. I mean, my lyrics make no sense in the first place, so it really doesn’t matter.
It was kind of also based off of Rosalia, like how popular Rosalia has become outside of Latin America and the rest of the Spanish speaking world. It’s like, no one knows what the fuck she’s saying, you know what I mean? And she’s huge, and she makes amazing hits and she’s very influential. So I was just kind of like, I think if the song is good enough and the melody’s there, and there’s maybe like one English word in there — in broken English at least — then it can translate. And also, you have an added aspect of mysteriousness where it’s like, if someone wants to know what I’m saying, they’re gonna have to look it up and translate it or put it into Google Translate, unless I put up a translation. So, you know, it gives maybe a fan an added layer of depth where they have to actually kind of go and research what I’m saying. And I kind of like how my lyrics in Italian translate into English because it kind of reads like a haiku poem. It doesn’t rhyme; it sounds very poetic.
I enjoy it, because I learned Italian at high school, so I understand enough to get an abstract sketch of what’s going on, but not enough to understand it. I’ve got the skeleton of what’s going on.
And that’s the funny thing is that my Italian is like, not amazing, because I moved here [to Australia] when I was quite young. So when I’m in Italy, people think I talk weird, so I’m kind of in this in between line where it’s like, all the people who’ve listened to my music in Italy — because obviously I do have a small fan base over there — the reason why they like my music is because no one else speaks Italian like this. I invent a lot of words, I take a lot of poetic license, things that don’t rhyme, I pronounce things in a really weird way to make them fit. I feel like that’s kind of been the appeal over there, but also I’m really interested to do a show over there and perform there and see what people actually think of my lyrics. I feel like the lyrics are fucking dope as fuck as well, but you’d only get them in that context.
So you’ve just mentioned you were over there, you’re back in Australia now. I’m very curious to hear how you found kind of your time over there, but also, how it gave you a different perspective on both your music and whatever the fuck is going on here in the Australian music industry at large.
Australia, when you come back here, definitely gives very small town vibes, coming from places like London or things that, at least within the West, are considered cultural hubs. The energy over there, I was basically just bouncing around. I went to Berlin, London and Milan and just tried to live there for a few weeks at a time. I met artists, there were people in Milan who already knew who I was so that was kind of easy, and then through them, I met other artists in Berlin, and so I linked up with them in Berlin. Had a studio session and then I’d meet someone there and then he’d know someone else in another city. I didn’t actually know anyone. I went there completely without knowing a single human soul and then met one person who knew one person and did this phone tree thing.
And so now whenever I go back to these cities, I have a studio on call, I can just WhatsApp and fucking record that night. That was the goal, to just set up little fires in the city over time. So it’s a strategic thing. Europe obviously has a lot more artists and a lot more people. Everyone in Milan has complaints about being with labels and there’s always majors everywhere in the scene trying to sign people. It’s the same as Australia, but just on a much larger scale. The best way to explain it is that Milan, which is essentially the business capital of Italy, as far as music, design and fashion, is essentially if you got everyone from Melbourne, and then you made them live in Sydney, but it was the size of Canberra. That’s Milan.
Let me just make sure I got that. So you’re combining the populations of Melbourne and Sydney?
Not exactly. I’m saying the people who live in Melbourne, if they lived in Sydney, like the city, but it was the size of Canberra. So it’s like Melbourne people in Sydney, the size of Canberra. In the sense where it’s equally trendy and up itself and mysterious and like, ‘I want to be famous but I also don’t want to promote my music Melbourne vibes,’ right? Paired with Sydney’s money and the Sydney Opera House. They’re the iconic city, that’s Australia — Sydney is Australia. So it’s like, there’s also like rich people, sunglasses at night, that kind of vibe, money, but it’s tiny. You could ride from one point in Milan to the other in half an hour. It’s really small, so it’s very tight knit. You go to an event, everyone’s there, and it’s always the same people. It’s very surreal.
That’s interesting. Was a little bit of a culture shock or not really?
At first, yes, but I got used to it fairly quickly. But also, usually when I’m in Europe, I kind of revert into my alter ego. I feel like since being there I was a lot happier, just because it’s a much more social — at least, Italy, as far as I can tell — it’s a much more social city, from my personal experience. People just go out all the time, people drink every day, but not in a gross way. You just have wine all the time. I never drink wine. People are always constantly going out. No one wants to stay at home, which is also a reason why the economy is so bad. But like socially, I don’t know, I just felt much more social, a lot more extroverted over there. It’s just very fun. I was very much loving life.
You’re here until the end of March, you’ve got shows coming up. Once you head back, you can go stoke those fires.
And that’s the thing, I don’t even know how big those fires are gonna be by the time I get back. It depends on how well these shows go, how well the music’s [going]. Music can be an overnight thing: you wake up, the song goes big. I try not to think further than a month or two ahead of time. It’s pointless.
Do you have any overarching goals for your music? Or is it just to keep pushing?
I have overarching goals, but it’s more of like a vague cloud in my head. It’s not really concrete things. I mean, I don’t know, play a festival. Make a fucking good amount of money. Certain artists I would love to work with. Yeah. I can’t describe it, but I know exactly where I want to be. But I just don’t know how long it will take. This year is going to be very big. More is going to happen in this year than any previous year combined, and it might have to do with the fact that I’m not on a label.
It’s always freeing.
Yeah.
Has it been frustrating? I’m not going to put words into your mouth, but it sounds like you’ve been held back a little bit.
Whether or not you’re being held back by a label, being a signed artist, even if your label loves you, it’s still going to take longer to release music through a label just because you have to go through more people, whereas when you’re independent, you just fucking drop it and you drop it. But the difference is that the label gave me certain thousands of dollars. There’s only so much complaining you can do. It’s like, you took the money.
For this project, Almanac made videos for four out of the five songs.
Yeah, a lot of videos. We cut mad corners on those ones. Two of the videos were shot like on a complete fucking skeleton budget. And then the other two we spent too much money on and so it kind of balanced out.
Which ones were the skeleton budget?
Can you tell?
I’m assuming AORA had a big budget.
That was the biggest one, yeah. That was almost five grand. But me and the director kind of split that one.
Per Ben’ O Per Mal, I would assume had a big budget.
No, that was 50 bucks. That one was the cheapest one, there was no money really. Bosco was like three grand. Per Ben’ O Per Mal, that was the single that I knew wouldn’t do as well as the other ones. We just wanted to drop something, and I’d driven out to a friend’s house in, I think it was in Point Cook actually. I just drove out to this guy’s house one time and drove past this massive stretch of land, and it looked very scenic and the sun was setting. I was like, ‘This is crazy, I’ve gotta shoot a video here.’ So I just had that in my mind. And then he also had a red camera at his house. So I was like, ‘Can I just borrow this camera?’ Everyone worked for free, free camera, free Steadicam one take — it was so simple, you know what I mean?
If you can imagine, we just drove out to the spot, reenacted the scene, I borrowed a sledgehammer from someone, convinced a few people and then bought them all dinner. And then, for some reason the card declined at the restaurant, dinner was free so I just paid 50 bucks for petrol. Free dinner for the whole crew! I don’t know, the EFTPOS machine fucked up, that’s their problem.
And then 2000 Metri, I just paid for the color grade so that was a couple hundred bucks. That was another, we just needed a video, I was like, ‘I need something insanely simple and very easy to shoot.’ But it took months of editing because I have no idea how to get that effect to work and so I downloaded like five different editing softwares, huge trial and error. If you look at it closely, there’s still some mistakes in the back.
Which editing software got the job done?
It was After Effects. I was trying to avoid using After Effects the whole time because I didn’t want to be complicated and so I downloaded all the other shittier ones and then I was like okay, I’m avoiding the the inevitable
Sometimes you’ve got to go back to Adobe.
They’re all cracked versions. You’ve got to make sure you turn your Wi-Fi off before you turn the software on or they’ll be like you need to use real Adobe software then you force quit and then they try and get mad at you.
There’s always a way around.
I owe them so much money. I have three accounts that I just left running because you know how you do the free trial? I forgot to cancel it. I did that like four times, I kept making new emails.
Don’t you have to put your card in?
My card, it just keeps declining. No money on my card! I declared it stolen. I’m also paying off like $1,000 worth of fines at the moment. There’s a lot going on.
Parking fines?
Driving related, speeding and red lights and things like that. You can park anywhere you like with a motorcycle. Melbourne’s actually one of the only cities in the world where you can park a motorcycle on the footpath. You can’t even do it in Sydney.
Can you do that in Italy?
In Italy, it’s like just fucking park it. There isn’t even a footpath. Just do whatever you want.
It’s a free for all.
I love Roman traffic, it’s hilarious.
Very boring question, but what is it like trying to drive around there?
It’s halfway between Bali and Melbourne. It’s not insane, but you can kind of bend the rules and no one cares, and you can really bend the rules and no one cares, but it’s still European. So it’s just a lot of beeping and you can just kind of park and double. People just kind of do what the fuck they want. Nothing works.
Just don’t do anything too drastically dangerous and no-one will give a fuck.
Exactly.
It’s All Happening Somewhere Else came out in 2021. A lot’s changed since then, both personally and professionally. What do you feel like has been the most important or big scale thing you’ve learnt about yourself from that project to now?
I’m overall a happier person, and a less insane person than I was in 2021, as of maybe like a year ago. Music isn’t everything to me as it was at that time, in the sense of like, if my career isn’t going well then I would go insane. Music, to me now is its own separate thing. Beforehand, music was me, and I could not separate from it, whereas now, the music and the music I make is its own thing, which I’m contributing to. And what that means is that, in the past, I wouldn’t make a lot of music. I would just have maybe 10-15 songs floating around that I would constantly be working on over years, and just constantly tweaking and adding things and waiting until when it was right.
Baro said this thing to me one time. He had this rule at one point [that] you have to finish a song in like three days, at least a demo, right? And if it’s taken longer than three days, then you’ve sat on it for too long. It’s poison, you know what I mean? It needs to be your first idea. The first idea that comes to mind, I record it. That’s the verse, that’s the chorus, that’s it. And then if I don’t like it, then the song will never come out. Just make another song.
There’s always a next burst of creativity.
Yeah.
There’s always something that comes after that. That’s interesting though. That’s a pretty huge mindset shift. Is there anything that triggered that or just taking a step back?
I was going through a break-up at the time. And I learned a lot from that and the person who I was with, and also — because we’re still friends as well — but she’s the complete polar opposite of me. So I feel like, whatever her personality was, or whatever she was trying to teach me, kind of clicked once we broke up. And then my dad gave me a self help book.
What self-help book?
Do you know — I feel like you know — it’s not The Art Of Not Giving A Fuck. It’s called The Power Of Now.
I’ve heard of it.
It reads very much like a self-help book. It has a lot of religious connotations and there’s a lot of cringe shit in it. If you manage to read past it, there’s some cool shit in there. I feel like the whole point of it is that it’s almost a meta thing in itself. Getting to the point in your head where you can read a self help book and take it kind of seriously and get past all the cringe shit means that you don’t need the self help, you know what I’m saying? You need to be at a certain level of not giving a fuck to read a self-help book, and not be cynical and be like, ‘This is cringe.’ You know what I mean? That the mindset you want to be in by the time you finish the book, is to like not is to just not care and just be like, celebrate your birthday. Just do Halloween. It’s easier to have fun than to be cynical, and fucking think about it. And so that’s kind of like the mindset but it was a combination of things.
I feel like it’s so easy to be irony poisoned. To see the world through a cynical lens.
I’m a very cynical person, when I need to be.
I feel like this is an unfair segue, but you do have a tour coming up.
Yeah, although I don’t want to call it that.
What do you want to call it then?
Playing two shows.
Playing two shows? That’s not what the poster looks like. It’s a tour.
But notice, I’ve made a specific effort to not say the word tour.
Why don’t you want to call it a tour?
I just have a pet peeve. I hate when cunts like fucking say they’re doing a tour, and it’s three shows in two cities. That’s not a fucking tour. You’re just doing two shows in two cities. A tour is like, three, four cities minimum, you know what I mean? I feel like people kinda just say tour, like, no, you just played a show in Melbourne, and you played a show in Sydney. That’s not a tour.
I feel like anytime you leave the state, you’re touring. You’re touring another state.
I guess, but I feel like it takes the meaning of the word tour away. When I think of tour in my head I think of, like, multiple dates, over multiple cities. As someone who kind of goes back and forth from Sydney, and Melbourne, if I played a show in Melbourne, in Feb, and then played another show in Sydney in May, which is something I’ve done before, and they are two completely unrelated shows, would I call that a tour? No, I’m just playing a show in Melbourne and a show in Sydney.
That’s not a tour. But if you put two dates on a poster, it becomes a tour.
It’s not a tour.
I’m not gonna tell you what to do… but it’s a tour.
It’ll be a tour when I say it’s a tour. In July, then maybe there’ll be an actual tour. But for now, I’m just playing two shows.
The line-ups for both shows are sick, by the way. First Australian headline show since last July, I believe? Looking forward to being back, playing another hometown show in Melbourne?
I’m very excited for the hometown show in Melbourne and Sydney should also be very interesting because I feel like Sydney is an interesting city. We’ve got a new stage set up, we’ve got a whole new setlist, tons of unreleased music, completely revamped, as it always is with every show. We’re putting a lot of thought into the stage design, the set design, the theatrics, exclusive remixes, special guests. I want it to be very much something focused on dancing, you know what I mean? I’m not someone who likes pauses in between songs, I’m not someone who likes that kind of stuff. I’m really trying to transition into more of a good dance friendly event. And I feel like this is exactly what that’s gonna be.
Amazing. It’s been lovely to speak to you today. One final question. What does Real Life Music mean to you?
I think what I touched on before. Pure instinct, in the sense that it’s your first idea, the music that comes when you’re thinking about it the absolute least. And it’s completely just body. And it’s something that sounds sick when I say it at the start of a song.
It does sound sick, I will give you that.
Especially when you say it in broken English. But this is what happens a lot of times, with a lot of the things I say, and also my lyrics, is that I’ll just say complete bullshit. And then when I’m asked about what it means, I go back and attach meaning to it. And what’s funny is that most of the time, I’ll be like, ‘Oh, this kind of sounds like I’m talking about this.’ And then everything in the song will link together and suddenly, the song sounds like it’s about something when it wasn’t when I wrote it. It was just a bunch of phrases.
So Real Life Music is just something I literally just said, I thought of it when I was high, but then if you think about the term, what does Real Life Music mean? And then I’m like, it kind of sounds like how I would describe the music I’m making right now. And so it ended up fitting in a sort of cosmic way.
Maybe that’s your subconscious reaching though.
I think that’s exactly what it is. So shout out to my subconscious, Real Subconscious Music will be the title of the next project.
You heard it here first!
DoloRRes’ new EP Real Life Music and the remix EP are out now.