{"id":44630,"date":"2021-09-16T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-16T14:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/?p=44630"},"modified":"2021-09-15T23:15:26","modified_gmt":"2021-09-16T03:15:26","slug":"julia-bardo-bauhaus-lappartamento","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.audiofemme.com\/julia-bardo-bauhaus-lappartamento\/","title":{"rendered":"Julia Bardo Embraces Outsider Italian Heritage On Solo Debut Bauhaus, L’Appartamento"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Photo Credit: Ashton Hugh<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

It’s okay not to be okay, according to Italian-born, UK-based Julia Bardo<\/a>. Her poppy folk-rock debut Bauhaus, L’Appartamento<\/em> (released September 10 via Wichita Recordings) is evidence that not being okay can be the catalyst for some very creatively fruitful self-investigation.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For Bardo, the introspective deep diving that ensued after moving from her home in Brescia, Italy to the UK city of Manchester enabled her to embrace being an outsider in her adopted home. Notoriously the land of stiff upper lips, bacon and eggs, soggy chips, rainy days and endless media about everything the Queen is wearing, it was a cultural anathema to Bardo’s vibrant, expressive, joyful liveliness (or vivacita!)<\/em> and at first, she wilted under the pressure to fit in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Until she was 13, Bardo lived in the small Italian province of Castegnato. Her aunt took her on a trip to London around that age, and Bardo felt instantly drawn to it. \u201cThe first time, I thought \u2018this is where I want to live\u2019 because I felt more like myself while I was there,\u201d she remembers. But when she finally moved to London in her twenties, she found it overwhelming. \u201cI moved to Manchester in 2016, when I was 23,” she recalls. “I was going to go to Bristol but they cancelled while we were on the train, so I took that as a sign that I should stay in Manchester.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Despite not knowing anyone, she\u2019d made the leap intending to pursue music and independence. And really, she\u2019d always felt like an outsider to some degree. Music was, in essence, the bridge between her inner self and the physical world.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMusic has always been present in my life since I was small… been there to keep me company, because I was quite a lonely kid, quite introverted. I barely had one friend and I stayed in the house all the time, listening to music and singing. My mum, we used to sing Italian songs together and my uncle is a jazz guitarist so we\u2019d sing altogether,” Bardo remembers. “When I was 13 my dad opened a bar and we moved to Brescia. I didn\u2019t know anyone so I spent my time working at the bar and when we didn\u2019t have many people there I\u2019d go into the staff toilet and listen to music and sing. Music was cathartic, something to soothe myself.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That need for soothing resonated around the world, so Bardo\u2019s album couldn\u2019t have arrived at a better time than now. Stuck indoors, Bardo spent 2020 indulging in her love of painting, songwriting, and watching the captivatingly beautiful films of both Federico Fellini and the visually seductive Michelangelo Antonioni. In their representations of Italy, she recognised her home as well as observing an imagined Italy, a place that outsiders have dreamed the nation into being. In peeling the layers of imagined place versus real, belonging and identity, and what home means to her, Bardo had the raw, buzzing, emotional material to craft her first full-length album. The title playfully draws on both her mood and on the name of the apartment block Bardo was living in when she was demoing the album.<\/p>\n\n\n\n