Odeon Disco from semi-instrumental power trio Malavita marries funkadelic warmth with a touch of retro melancholy and a a hypnotic spacey melodic riff that will stick with you for days. Or maybe it was just a dream.
We chat with the band about the song—read the interview below!
Describe your sound in 3 words
If it has to be only three we would say psychedelic, vintage and cinematic.
Tell us a few things about Odeon Disco. What is the story behind it?
The song is dedicated to the golden age of 1970s Italian nightclubs and refers to an imaginary club, called “Odeon” like a lot of Italian old cinemas, now mostly disappeared. “Odeon Disco” is thus a place somewhere between fantasy and reality, a symbol of a world that no longer exists, of the excitement and magic of that era, like remembering a summer night at the disco with a touch of melancholy.
We wanted the sounds, melodies, and lyrics to explore this space between effervescence and emotion, experienced and remembered, and the nostalgia of a thrill now gone, almost as if it were only a dream.
The band formed relatively recently in Brussels in 2025. What was the initial driving force or shared musical vision that brought the three of you together to start this specific project?
Federico and I know each other since years, have collaborated already on other personal projects and play together in another band, so it was quite natural for us to start working together on new ideas. At the beginning it was almost just a test, but we soon felt that there was a strong common vision and energy that wad building around the emerging concept. Thanks to this enthusiasm and great vibe, the project became something more concrete quite quickly.
It was a really nice feel to see that we could mix our musical background and influences and that we both had a common objective to attain, so that made everything easier. Being both Italians living in Brussels for years, the exploration of Italian vintage soundscapes became also a way to bring in the memories of growing up in our home country, and even reflect on the collective imaginary so strongly connected to Italy as a country.
At the beginning it was only the two of us working in the studio, but when Marco started collaborating with us shortly after he was the last missing piece to really feel like a band.
As a semi-instrumental trio, your arrangements must be very precise. What does the typical songwriting process look like for Malavita? Do you start with a groove, a melody, or a visual concept?
The songwriting and arrangement process really depends on the song. We normally start from an idea, either coming from Fede or myself. Sometimes it’s just a very initial sketch, like a riff, a chord progression, a groove, while sometimes we have something a bit more precise already. Either way, we then always work together to grow these initial ideas into songs, developing or changing parts, finding new melodies, creating the song structure and so on. What helps is that we generally have a clear idea of the direction the music should take and of what style it should have from the beginning.
When this process is more advanced, Marco adds drums and grooves and we then move to the last steps of finetuning sounds and mixes. The fact that Fede is also a producer hugely facilitates the work, as we can easily test arrangement solutions and find the right identity for each song quite quickly.
The visual element and concept normally only come later, when the song is already emerging, but that can also influence and speed up the last phases of the writing and production flow.
Your sound is deeply inspired by the soundtracks of 1960s and 1970s Italian films. Could you name one or two specific film scores or composers that were essential blueprints for the Malavita aesthetic, and what specific emotion or mood did you aim to capture?
We don’t necessarily take specific composers and scores as a clear blueprint for what we do, we rather mix flavours and inspirations depending on what we try to convey each time. However, there are surely several Italian composers who do influence our style, or provide the inspirations we then reinterpret. The most obvious one is surely Ennio Morricone, whose legacy does not need any more presentation. We deeply love his works, for the classic spaghetti-western sound he basically invented, but also for the very evocative and lyric vein in a lot of his compositions. They really have a strong visual element in them, making you feel a place, or long for it.
Other composers we appreciate are Piero Umiliani and Stelvio Cipriani, for their 70s funky style which became so distinctive in the classic Italian detective movies. Other pivotal references in our music are composers like Nino Rota, who worked a lot with Fellini, and Nicola Piovani, very active since the 80s.
Their beautiful and classic Italian melodies are a great inspiration for our more nostalgic side, where we try to musically bring to life memories from the Italy of the 60s and 70s, and touch a sort of mythical and dream-like past, sometimes even more real than the actual past itself.
In which place or state of mind do you imagine people might listen to your music?
We’d like our music to make people listening to us to feel like they’re travelling, to a specific place or maybe only through their mind and memories, to grab a glimpse of an old flavour, a glance of a moment making you feel your presence somewhere, of lived life and dreams. We could suggest some imaginary places and fleeting instants we had in mind while composing and listening to our music – the melancholic feeling of a late summer afternoon long gone on the Italian riviera, or the sensation you can feel in the air when it’s September and the season changes – but in the end what we really hope is to bring our listeners to a place they want, where they feel something.
Why does criticism last longer than praise?
Hmm, praise is important to go on in an enthusiastic way and believe in what you do, but it can also go to your head or make you less meticulous. Criticism, in particular constructive, is sometimes quite important, to be more focused and precise in your work or craft. In the end with criticism it’s all a matter of balance, and with self-criticism too : some is good, but if it’s too much it blocks you.
If the music of Malavita was a film, which film would that be?
That’s a great question, but we will have to name two films at the very least, sorry 🙂 Firstly, “C’era una volta il west / Once upon a time in the west” from Sergio Leone, for its lyric beauty and almost magical capacity to represent a changing world, the end of an era and the beginning of a new one. Then, we’ll go for “Otto e mezzo / 8 and 1/2” from Fellini, for its dream-like and surreal poetry.
Thank you!
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