APE UNIT - Welcome To The Grotesque Sonic Chaos ! (Italy - Grindcore/Powerviolence - Interview with Alberto).

Hello ! Can you introduce yourself and tell us how it all began for you - your encounter with this musical universe, what appealed to you, what fascinated you and what made you want to get into music? 
Hi everyone, this is Alberto, guitar in Ape Unit. I first came across punk music when I was 13-14 years old thanks to some older friends of mine. By the time I saw my very first punk show - it was a makeshift one organised in the city theatre of the small town I used to live in - I had been listening to classic rock, mostly: records or cassettes which belonged to my father.
I can’t say that first gig impressed me much musically speaking, but the fact it was played by my peers and with such intensity surely led me to take up the guitar and start a band. I took some lessons to learn the basics and then I spent lots of time playing along records instead of doing my homework. Covering crossover and melodic hc bands from the late 90s/early 2000s – along with grunge and thrash metal acts – was crucial to me to understand how good riffs were made and did work within a song structure, and by the age of 17 I was in a band and kind of mimicking my heroes with my own riffs. Growing up, I started digging heavier stuff and pretty much any kind of music, the more extreme, dissonant, angular and experimental, the better. So here I am, ahahah.

Tell me about the band... How you met - the current line-up - past experiences - and above all - WHY the need to form THIS band?
APE UNIT is a grindcore/powerviolence band hailing from Cuneo, a small city in the North-West of Italy. When we started messing up together in 2008, we didn’t have any idea about how to play grindcore and could barely make it to the end of a song since no one had ever had any experience in the field, but then we started focussing on the things we could do best, practiced a lot, got better at writing/playing and eventually became tighter and tighter.
The funny thing is that no one was really into this genres at the beginning. We just wanted to play fast, down-tuned and distorted riffs the way they came out.
The line-up has changed over the years, initially from a 5-piece to a 4-piece, then to a 5-piece again and has settled to a 4-piece lately, consisting of myself on guitar, Mariano on vocals, Elia on drums and Umberto on bass.Mariano and I have been playing together for more than 25 years: we alreay were in bands in our late teens. Besides, he used to sing in Septycal Gorge, a brutal death band which became very influential and released 3 thundering records, while I cut my teeth playing in noise rock, post rock and post hardcore acts, among which The Glad Husbands, with which I’ve been playing for ages.
Why the need to form this band? Well, let’s say that it all began out of fun, really. Back then, I wasn’t personally into heavy and fast stuff that much, though I liked bands like Napalm Death, Terrorizer and Brutal Truth – I had never played that stuff in a real band or seriously.
Then, one day (the guy who’d become) our former guitar player and I were having a beer while figuring out how the name of a grindcore band had to be to sound aggressive and ignorant at the same time, and we came out with “the idea” lying behind Ape Unit, which is ‘animal chaos and brutality’ on the one hand (Ape), and the need to keep it somehow under control giving it some sort of form on the other (Unit). Over the years we’ve stuck to this name and become aware that the music we were playing perfectly reflected it, since it was a blend of “controlled fury”, where hectic riffs, screams, fast-paced rhythms and breakdowns all coexisted in harmony within each song.

Describe your sound and explain why I should listen to YOUR band at all cost?
I guess we always tried to go beyond the boundaries of our genre. I mean, sure we play heavy music to most people, but we never wrote down stuff to match a precise description, neither we ever tried to conform to any trend.
Some say we are a grind/powerviolence band, and if on the one hand that definition surely fits up to a point and is fine with us, on the other hand, our sound also incorporates elements from other musical genres such as noise rock and post hardcore.
As a result, I think our songs sound weird and kind of unpredictable, that’s why they are yummy and catchy even though they pretty much hit hard all the time! Maybe you should listen to us because of this: you never know what’s going to happen within a one-minute track!


 
Lyrical and musical inspirations/influences? How important are the lyrics for you? Are there any specific messages or thoughts you try to develop and share through your lyrics? 
As I said before, our personal contribution to songwriting has always been quite varied. All of us have very different musical backgrounds and the music we listen to daily is sometimes far from being homogeneous. We like all kinds of music: Umberto is a classically trained upright bass player and he’s mostly into post rock and math rock from the 90s or early 2000s: he grew up listening to bands like Don Caballero, Trans Am, Tortoise and so on.
Mariano and Elia are probably the ones whose tastes perfectly fit with the extreme-metal fan: both like metal in all its forms and subgenres. As for me, I’ve always been into post hc and noise rock and to write down riffs over the years I’ve drawn inspiration from bands such as Botch, Keelhaul, Dazzling Killmen, The Jesus Lizard, Colossamite and alike, other than the grind bands I’ve mentioned before.
Lyrically speaking, we never tried to get any specific message across, nor any committed slogan, let alone talking about politics. Though we’re socially conscious and politically minded, we tend to base our lyrics on surreal and grotesque daily life episodes either we experienced personally or heard from the news, as well as on commonplaces and stereotypes of modern society and culture. Sometimes they might sound silly and gross, or simply nonsense, but they’re all splashed with a good dose of irony, sarcasm and self-mockery as well. We don’t take ourselves nor our lyrics too seriously and that’s the way we want them to be. We usually write them down starting from weird titles: we have a huge and never-ending list of them yet to be used!
 
About the band's discography, imagine someone who doesn't know your band at all and wants to get interested in.. Which release would you recommend to start with, and why? 
I would recommend to start from our latest ep “Sticks”: it is the tightest and probably the one which sounds better, even though we consider it as a “transitional ep”, being the first experimenting with some new sounds and stuff and being recorded by the new line-up. Then I guess you can leaf through all the previous releases backwards: each one has its own soul and reflects a precise phase of the band. “Filth” is probably the most psyched-out of them all, while “Turd” is the first that set our “standard sound” for sure.

About your latest release?
"Sticks" was recorded and mixed by Dave Donvito - a friend of ours who, other than running Magma Recordings in Turin, Italy, also plays in post-black metal act Thirst Prayer with Elia. It’s made up of 10 songs (8 on the 7’’ edition, 10 on the Japanese CD edition) and is the result of spring and summer 2025 being spent rehearsing new stuff before we entered the studio in October. It took us 4 days to record the ep and some more to come up with the mixed version. We had to record separate tracks because we all work different shifts, so I played along with Elia on the first day, recorded a second guitar line on the second day and on the third and fourth day Umberto and Mariano added bass lines and vocals plus some re-amps. Dave really captured the fierce immediacy of the songs and made us feel comfortable and helped us from day one. Once the mix was ready, we sent it overseas to James Plotkin who took care of the mastering and “baked the cake” exactly as we wanted.
Sticks is out in two formats: black or red 7’’ and CD. You can listen to it easily on the web too. It is available almost everywhere thanks to Distrokid, but we mostly rely on our bandcamp page for sale, though. 
Lyrics and artwork are strictly linked: the songs deal with real stories and characters we kind of fictionalized to fit our ultra-short songs and better describe the freakish and absurd world around us. The grotesque characters in the artwork are arranged in a twisted “Last Supper” or “nativity scene” where everybody seems out of place. Hiding behind this group of people are imaginary beasts ready to mangle them all. Isn’t this a good description of the reality we live in? Here’s how we managed to create it: we gave our friend Gianluca Viano AKA The FTZ some hints about how we imagined the whole artwork and asked him to fiddle around with the AI. He came up with random spooky images where apes and human beings mingle in surreal and plastic dioramas. We picked some and then turned these pictures into 3d models and printed them with the help of Andrea Mariani AKA Iban Il Terribile, adding more randomized effects. I consequently took care of assembling and painting all the parts and finally photographer Valo Schio, a close friend of ours, built up a little set and shot the pictures we used for the final artwork. It was a 100% digital to 100% analog process: you can clearly see the difference between the two versions by comparing our 7’’ edition to the limited Japanese CD edition.
We’re backed by 10 labels this time and we’re very lucky to have such great people supporting us across Europe, the States and Japan. Printing and distributing even a small amount of copies is not that easy nowadays: we wanted to keep it simple and in the DIY tradition as we always did in the past, and those guys really helped us out.

In case you're about to release something new really soon, speak about this upcoming release instead ;-) 
We’re working on some new ideas for a split, maybe. This time we’d like to write songs getting inspired by new guitar and bass sounds instead of just relying on riffs and patterns as we always did. I mean, we’d like to experiment a little with pedals to bastardize our sound and make it weirder. Who knows what’s gonna happen?


 
Future plans? 
Write down some new crazy stuff, play it around the world and keep having fun the way we always do.
 
Your most insane dream with the band would be?
I’d say releasing splits with great bands and touring Australia and East Asia!
 
Your BEST & WORST concert - as a band - and why? 
Worst - twelve years ago we were scheduled to play at a festival in Switzerland: we went there right on time for the soundcheck at approximately 2pm, as the organizer asked us to do. Keep in mind it’s a 5-hour trip from the place we’re from, besides, our bass player was due to arrive hours later with his own car because he had personal commitments and couldn’t travel with us. Once there, we never did any soundcheck and waited patiently for our turn to play instead. Local bands of youngsters followed one after the other for the whole afternoon and things started going awry when these guys piled up a huge amount of delay. We were to play at around 12pm, but at 11pm at least 6 bands still had to play before us. Everybody around was asking questions to the organizers about the time they would have hit the stage and slowly getting upset, so were we. I was really pissed off so - as we understood there was no way to sort things out - we asked to be paid to get out of the way, said goodbye and came back without playing. While approaching home at 6am, a friend of ours who lived there told us it was officially our turn to get on stage…
Best – probably our whole US tour back in 2017: we played 15 shows in a row in very different places and venues, from small festivals, to clubs, even to private kitchens and living rooms! Each show was a blast, and the audience over there was soooo nice and supportive!


 
Next live-appearance(s)?
A couple of local shows by the end of the months (one with UK-based Chinese grind/pv band C.H.O.U. on July 10 and one at a friend’s birthday party on July 18) and some more next fall we’re working on right now!
 
Some words on your local scene - bands you're friends with and you'd like to name? 
The area where we’re from (Cuneo, north west of Italy) has always been considered as a remote province even by bands coming to play here from the near big cities of Turin, Genoa and Milan. There were few clubs and venues in the past and there are fewer and fewer right now, however the local scene has always been thriving and lively. We can’t talk about a proper hardcore/grindcore scene though, I would say bands in the area are mostly noise-rock-oriented acts but they (luckily?) don’t follow any particular or current trends, so everybody here plays what he likes and has developed his own personal style. If you want to see grind/pv bands on stage you must go to Turin or even better to Lombardy, Veneto or Emilia Romagna. By the way, there are some bands we’ve been in close contact with over the years and/or that we deeply respect, even though they mostly come from other regions. Among them are Storm(o), Double Me, ANF, Plague Bomb, Hobos, Gufonero, Grumo and One Day In Fukushima. Talking about bands that come from our same area, check out Failure - whom I guess you should already know about - and So Close (our ex-drummer Steve plays/sings in both bands), Thirst Prayer, Tons, If I Die Today, Norse, Pigro, Melee, Gotho, Sacrofuoco and Bialera. 

Last word is yours.. 
Thank you soooo much for your time!!