‘70kkisses’ by Simone Antonioni
There is a particular kind of tiredness that comes from wanting, from desire. Simone Antonioni knows it well, and ‘70kkisses’ is, among other things, his attempt to sit with that feeling long enough to understand it. The song began the way most of his work does: music first, then a microphone, then words that arrived before he had time to edit them. The title came later, from a real conversation with his partner Kate, a five-year relationship measured in an unexpected unit. Seventy thousand kisses. The number is almost absurd, which is probably why it works.
The video was shot in Texas over the 2025 Christmas holidays, mostly from a car window or a hotel room. Cars, buildings, the particular scale of a city that makes you feel small in a way Italy never quite managed. Embedded inside that footage is a VHS clip from 2002, shot by Antonioni as a child in Modena, the year the euro arrived. A man with a coin. A kid with a camera, already framing things. He references Helmut Newton in the lyrics, and means it as an image more than a name. The Helmut Newton Foundation in Berlin, the beauty of that work, and the slight unease of how completely it belongs to a world of surfaces. Antonioni holds both things at once. He always does.
Let's start with your process. How long does it take you to finish a song?
I don't force deadlines. I’ve been working on this probably few years. I focus on the aesthetics until it feels right. Sometimes a song takes a year, a year and a half. With the three tracks I just released, maybe 60% of the idea comes in a single day, and the remaining 40% takes the rest of the time. I live it more like a stream than a structured album cycle, though at some point I'll probably shift toward that too.
Let's talk about 70KKisses specifically. Where does the title come from?
About 80% of the lyrics came out spontaneously. I draft the music, then I just face the microphone and let it flow. The titles work differently though. I collect them throughout the day, on different occasions, and the ones that stick are usually the ones that carry an image rather than a literal meaning. I was actually inspired by an interview with Alexander Levy of ERD, where he talks about being drawn to the feeling of a sentence rather than its literal sense. That's exactly how I work. 70kkisses came from something very personal: I was talking with Kate, and since we've been together five years, I started calculating how many times we'd kissed. The number came out around 70,000. It's not tied to a concept. It's just an image I kept turning over in my head.
The video was shot across several cities in Texas, filmed directly, camera in hand, capturing real moments from a trip between 2025 and 2026. But there's also an older section, in VHS, from New Year's Eve 2002. Can you talk about how those two parts came together?
When I shoot, I'm working between two things at once: an aesthetic ideal I'm moving toward, and whatever is actually in front of me in that moment. For me, there's no real separation between living and the artistic process. Even on a trip in China I am right now, we were staying in a hotel with no window, so we moved to another one just to get a view from the 15th floor: cars, buildings, the feeling of a metropolis. That's something I've been chasing for a long time. Coming from Italy, you rarely get that sense of scale. And actually, I've found it more in China than in America. Cities like Suzhou feel more like a metropolis than most American ones.
As for the VHS section, my father sent me that footage I did a few months ago, and I kept it with the vague sense it belonged somewhere. It's a video I made as a child, with no real artistic intention, and that's exactly what interests me about it. I wanted to look at it and ask: was there already a creative intuition there? That instinct to make sense of things through images is something we carry our whole lives. Including it in this project felt like an important gesture, bringing that early memory into a context that, aesthetically, I think it earns.
In that VHS footage, you frame a man pulling out a wallet with a 20-euro coin, so it would have been 2002, the first year of the euro. Were you in Italy when you shot that?
Yes, in Modena, most likely. That sequence also speaks to one of the themes running through the whole piece: the exhaustion of wanting material things. Not money exactly, more the relationship with objects. I see something I like, lately it's been vintage watches, and even if I don't buy it, the desire itself creates this strange tiredness. It's a feeling that can be genuinely beautiful. It generates a whole internal aesthetic process. But it's also superficial, and at some point it weighs on you. This song helps me work through a feeling like that, it might seem minor but isn’t necessarily less important because of that.
At one point in the lyrics, you reference Helmut Newton. Why him?
Partly because it fit rhythmically in that moment of the song, but also because I was in Berlin at the Helmut Newton Foundation while I was writing the piece. His work is aesthetically stunning, but it's also deeply materialistic, completely tied to fashion and surface. For me, he represented that tension I was already playing with: something that has real craft and visual beauty, but that tips into decadence when it becomes purely about consumption. I saw a lot of that in his work. It's more of an image than a thesis. You walk through that museum and the idea gets lodged in your head, the place where artistic beauty and fashion materialism collapse into each other. That made sense in the context of this piece.
Why Texas specifically?
Until that trip, I'd only been to New York in America. I wanted to see something different, and Christmas made it feasible. There wasn't a grand plan, but Texas interested me for the space. The emptiness. We drove five or six hours some days and saw almost nothing. That sense of isolation connects to something personal: I grew up in a place in Italy that actually felt similar. Small centers, everything by car, no real way to move through the world on foot. There's an alienation in that kind of landscape that I find genuinely interesting. I live with a constant tension between wanting personal space and wanting to connect with people, and being somewhere with that much empty land around you made that feeling very physical. Not a revelation exactly, more like a gesture toward understanding it.
Music and Film by Simone Antonioni
Mastering by Sin Maldita
Filmed in Houston, Austin, Dallas, Arlington, Fort Worth, Modena.
Years of Filming 2026, 2025, 2003.
Portrait by Spyros Droussiotis
Interview by Donald Gjoka
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