For over two decades, Alexander Hacke and Danielle de Picciotto, known together as hackedepicciotto, have been carving out a unique creative legacy defined by artistic synergy and fearless exploration. The duo’s newly released The Best of hackedepicciotto (Live in Napoli) captures the vibrant essence of their live performances, featuring reimagined tracks from all their studio albums. Spanning years of artistic growth, the album offers listeners a window into the dynamic evolution of their sound and live energy.
Alexander Hacke began experimenting with cassette loops at 14 and soon after joined the highly influential German band Einstürzende Neubauten. Danielle de Picciotto is an artist, musician, and filmmaker who co-founded the Berlin Love Parade and has been part of musical projects such as The Space Cowboys and Ocean Club. Since 2001, the pair have combined their talents, embracing a nomadic lifestyle that deeply informs their work.
With Live in Napoli, hackedepicciotto offer a reflection on their journey, inviting listeners into the intimate process of musical reinvention that occurs on stage. Recorded at Auditorium Novecento in Naples, this release serves as both an entry point for new fans and a gift for those unable to witness their concerts firsthand.
What was the inspiration behind doing a live album at this point in your career?
Danielle de Picciotto: Well, as you probably know, we recorded our last album, Keepsakes, in this Italian recording studio in Naples. And we discovered this recording studio because we’re invited to do a live show there; they have live shows four times a year there. And after we recorded the album there, they invited us to do another show there. So, we had two live shows that a professional recording studio had recorded, with really good quality. And we were listening to it and we thought, it’s actually really interesting how the music develops through playing it live because it has a different kind of energy. And it also changes its kind of composition because the way we recorded it, it isn’t really possible to play it live. So, it gets adjusted, and it gets a life of its own. And so we were listening, and we thought that it’s actually really interesting because the songs that have changed most over the years, and that have the best energy, actually represent a cross selection of all our albums.
And then we thought, because many people can’t see our shows on different continents and they’ve always said they’d love to see a show, we thought this would be a really good possibility of giving people an impression of what a live show sounds like, and for the people that have come to our live shows to hear how the songs have changed through performing. So, that’s why we thought this was a perfect possibility. We’re probably never going to get record live recordings as great as the ones recorded in the studio where we recorded our album. So, I thought that makes sense. And we told Mute, and they were enthusiastic, so we said, okay, let’s do that.
Alexander Hacke: The songs that we chose are the ones that morphed the most, among the ones that changed the most, and the ones that developed the most into a new direction. And they are sort of related to their original recordings, but they really have developed a completely new life on their own, and that’s why we chose them.
Does that aspect affect the way you write new material at all, in terms of how you’ve seen the previous work change through performances?
Alexander Hacke: Well, it’s only the two of us and sometimes we do up to four instrument changes within one song. Of course, we always keep in mind that we probably would like to perform songs [live] in one way or another, and, therefore, that certainly has an impact on how we write. We try to produce in a very efficient way because usually we don’t give ourselves much time. Then there is the factor that it is the two of us traveling with our entire instrumentation by train, mostly, and the two of us on stage, and we put all these factors into consideration.
Danielle de Picciotto: About 50% of the songs that we record, we do not play live because we always get carried away. For instance, when we were at the Auditorium Novecento, recording there in Naples, there was a grand piano there, there were tubular bells, there was a chelys, there were all kinds of instruments where we were like, ‘oh my god, how great, let’s play them too.’ Obviously, we can’t play them on stage. Some songs we record, we’re basically playing all of our instruments simultaneously, which we obviously also cannot perform on stage. So, I’d say about 50% of the songs we record, we do not play on stage, we cannot perform live. That narrows it down to the ones that we do play on stage. And of those, let’s say there’s one-third have very strong backings, because otherwise we wouldn’t be able to play them either. And so, the ones that change are the last two-thirds where we play most of the stuff live and it really develops. So, we thought that was an interesting aspect of our music, specifically, only the two of us, and we play all those different instruments.
Do you feel the album represents what your typical concerts are like, or did recording live at Auditorium Novecento provide additional resources or otherwise make it differ?
Alexander Hacke: Yeah, it represents what our live shows are like. It’s more we influenced by our surroundings more in the process of writing. As you may know, we have recorded our first album in the Mojave desert, our second one in residency in Austria in the church, and then by the Irish Sea on the northwestern coast of England and Blackpool. And these circumstances do definitely very much inform what we do and when we are in the live situation, it’s more of a ritualistic thing where we try to call up a certain energy that works within the room between us, the two of us on stage and us in interaction with the audience. And that is the energy we tried to call up then.
Are your current live shows those inspired by this album? Are you focusing on doing a cross section, rather than drawing more from your most recent studio album?
Danielle de Picciotto: Well, I mean, we represent our recent studio album, Keepsakes, with four songs, and we represent all the other albums with two songs each. So, we’re actually playing the live album pretty much the way it is because that way we can represent all of our albums and when people come to us often after the show, they come and say, so which album did you play these songs from so I know which ones to buy? We can tell them everything we played tonight is on the live album. So that makes things easier, and it’s a wonderful representation of all of our work for people and we hope that through this album they’ll be curious to check out our other albums as well.
Having done this project first many years now, what place does hackedepicciotto hold in your overall careers? Where does it fit creatively among all the other projects that you do?
Alexander Hacke: For me, Einstürzende Neubauten is my main project that most people think of. Danielle and I operate on a level I feel is unsurpassed by anything that I do with Neubauten or commissioned works. We have a level, a degree of intimacy and understanding and telepathic communication going between the two of us. That makes it very, I wouldn’t say very easy, but that makes it very intense and the work just goes a lot deeper I find than with other stuff that I do. I don’t know what it’s like for you, Danielle.
Danielle de Picciotto: Well, I think that we have reached a point where we know our sound pretty well; we know what functions together. It took a long time to kind of get to that point because we do so many different things and we can do so many different things. And I think that we’ve reached a point where we kind of know what our sound is like and it’s a lot of fun playing around with that sound. It was fun in Naples to play around on the grand piano or to use tubular bells, and we’ve been thinking a lot about what to do next, and we’d like to experiment more with electronic sound on top of what we do anyway. So, once you’ve kind of found your sound, it’s not about sticking to that in a very controlled manner, but using that to expand into all kinds of different areas, and it’s fun. I can’t wait to start the next one. If it was up to us, we’d be releasing an album twice a year, I think. We really enjoy the work, but Mute’s always like, ‘come on, we have to go slow. Not more than one a year maximum, maybe even one every two years. ‘So yeah, we can’t release as much as we would want to, but looking forward to the next one.
Is there anything else coming up in the future you’d like to mention?
Danielle de Picciotto: Well, we’re going to be doing music for a theater piece in the next two years. A French theater piece by a French director called Sophie Perez, she’s very known for her surrealist masks and stuff. So, we’re really looking forward to that. We’re going to be doing a couple of collaborations, so that’s going to be nice. I mean, it’s really nice doing it, the two of us, but it’s also really fun collaborating with other artists. We’ve been doing a lot of film music lately, so it’s going to be in a lot of areas.
For more info, visit https://www.hackedepicciotto.de/. Buy music at hackedepicciotto.bandcamp.com.
