Today we’d like to introduce you to Valente Bertelli.
Valente, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
I was born in Rome (Italy) and raised in the Italian part of Switzerland. My Father was a Theater Director working mostly within the Opera world at the time, my Mother was a Jazz singer, and my sisters were Punk and New Wave fanatics. In one shape or another, music had always been around me, so it never felt like a “choice”, per se; it was just what I always knew I’d be making.
As an adolescent, I spent my high school years in a Catholic boarding school in a small Swiss-Italian town on a lake. At every break, I would religiously walk to a bench overlooking the water and would just sit there and listen to records, thinking about a life I’d one day live. I suppose I wanted to escape, just like everybody does when they are 16.
Once out of boarding school I moved to California to go to Musicians Institute (MI) in Hollywood as a bass player, after graduating, I studied Songwriting and Film Scoring at UCLA. I posted my first solo release on the internet, and all of a sudden people like T-Bone Burnett, Guy Sigsworth (who produced some of Björk’s early releases), Marc Collin (of Nouvelle Vague) got in touch. It seemed like all of a sudden I was part of the club, yet I didn’t feel like I belonged, somehow. Following that I spent my fair share of time on the road playing, while scoring a lot of big award-winning international ad campaigns, yet it still felt like two different career paths: the first one was becoming a full-time touring artist; the second was to work as a composer, creating the musical landscape around moving images. It was a formative, successful but elusively unclear period for me, until I had a sort of revelation, in the form of a tragic news: David Bowie’s death.
More than his passing, it was his leaving behind of a “musical will” of sorts (in the form of the album Blackstar) that opened my eyes to what “commitment to one’s Art” and one’s own path really meant.
Bowie had more money than Midas, he could have easily called it quits and spent his days on a tropical island but instead, he decided to live his last days doing what he loved tirelessly until the wheels fell off. It felt like a sort of a tacit encouragement from the afterlife that I needed to “choose my own adventure”, wherever it might lead, and stay true to what has always been most important to me: Music. Looking through the lens of my career, it became suddenly apparent that instead of making a decision between being an artist or being a composer, my creative path was to imagine a possibility outside of those two constructs. Something that was more than the sum of its parts, something true to what felt right, deep down in my gut. My world as an Artist was absolutely interlinked with what I do as a Composer – as opposed to being two separate entities. That’s when I created Slow Shiver, my artistic persona, so to speak. I chose that name in order to ensure I wouldn’t lose sight of what I wanted to elicit when one listens to what I do. Once I made the decision to create Slow Shiver and to make it my main goal, everything started clicking and picking up speed.
After releasing my first single (which not coincidentally was a cover of Bowie’s “Dead Man Walking”), Paul Boyd reached out asking if I’d like to shoot with him. His timeless videos for entirely too many artists to mention were the imagery on TV of my childhood. We shot the video to “In Blue (Drive by Delivery)” as an ode to Helmut Newton; talk about someone who knows how to make a beautiful piece. I then scored “Bushido Battleground” my first TV Series, for Robert Rodriguez’ El Rey. Followed composing Music for “Confused” directed by the amazing Jesse Salto. The main point being, that once I figured out what this all meant to me, the path ahead became clear.
Focusing back on musical releases in the meantime, I just got back from Reykjavík (Iceland) where I recorded brass for the new Slow Shiver album I’ve been working on. It’s scheduled to be released at the beginning of 2020.
Great, so let’s dig a little deeper into the story – has it been an easy path overall and if not, what were the challenges you’ve had to overcome?
I truly believe that anyone who says their career was a smooth road, are either not paying attention or are trying to curate the truth. I feel that the ultimate challenge human beings are exposed to is learning from the lessons they are being taught along the road, and evolve from those.
Through the various setbacks along the way, I’ve tried to look for a pattern – and what I found was that my perspective was faulty, not the reality. As time went by, I realized that whether things were going great (or not so much), it was my focus on my goal that was important for the future outcome of what I was doing, not my obsessing over the current impermanent situation.
A while back, I came across an idea that changed how I live my life to a great degree. We’re all familiar with the concept of paranoia. PROnoia, on the other hand, is “the suspicion that everyone is secretly trying to help you”. I love that idea, as it has allowed me to stay loose and focus on vision, before the fear that “everything will not go as planned”, would have a chance to speak. It’s not believing in magical thinking, but rather tricking oneself into a new point of view; not allowing one’s mind to be a catastrophist, but rather work on what makes one good at what one does, and let the forces that need to appear, appear when they need to. I hope this concept catches on amongst fellow humans, as it surely helped me iron my road.
We’d love to hear more about your work.
I am a storyteller. I use Music as my medium to tell a story. Whether it’s a song that stands on its own or something that adds an emotional layer to a moving picture, that is what I do. I tell stories through Music.
I’m into creating a “world”, not just making music. I feel that Directors and other fellow storytellers have seeked me out because just like them, I am committed out of personal conviction, to making sure the story being told, is done so in the best, most enveloping way possible; they know that, just like them, I’ve honed my sense of aesthetic in order not to just add, but make more real the thing they are trying to convey. It’s a kind of trust I have not found anywhere else, a shorthand you get only between fellow trenchmen, so to speak.
Is there a characteristic or quality that you feel is essential to success?
Surprisingly enough it was my committing to the word “No” that made my career grow to where it is now. A while ago, while talking to a potential agent, I asked: “what is the no.1 piece of advice you give to people most often, that they don’t take.” He thought about it, and replied: “To say ‘No’ more often.”.
By choosing deliberately what I want to spend my finite time on earth working on, I’m deciding to make something my own, and as good as I know how to make it be, so it never feels like a job, but rather like seeing to it that something that is important to me, comes to life. As a freelancer, it has saved me many times from filling my schedule with things I didn’t believe in so that I could have time to work on what creatively excited me. I have also been lucky in the sense that work has always found its way to me, yet I think a big part of that is because as I was mentioning earlier, fellow storytellers know instinctively that kinship, that bond of being able to rely on another creative, not because of fear of what might come, but rather a belief in what is to come.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.slowshiver.com/
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/slowshiver/
- Facebook: http://facebook.com/slowshiver
Image Credit:
Artist photo by: Jesse Salto
Second photo by: Matthew Bowers
Covers by: Manufactur
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