Name: Mario Quadracci aka Ceiling Spirits
Nationality: American
Occupation: Composer, multi-instrumentalist, producer
Current Release: The new Ceiling Spirits album The Bloodwren is out now digitally. A limited edition vinyl release will follow in June 2024. It features collaborations with The National’s Brian Devendorf and Augustines’ Eric Sanderson.

If you enjoyed this Ceiling Spirits interview, you can find out more about him and his music on Instagram, and Facebook.



Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

It really varies for me. Ceiling Spirits began as a live film scoring experiment. I would mine interesting bits of found footage that evoked something in me, piece it together into a sort meta narrative, then try to express that musically live.

Those shows, which I performed solo, gave me quite a bit of freedom to improvise within certain parameters as long as I hit the transitions to new scenes. The first Ceiling Spirits record was born of those performances and is very atmospheric and harmonically straghtforward because I was reliant on texture and layering rather than lots of changes when performing the content alone.



This new record is totally different. The unique circumstances brought on by the pandemic and the political turmoil of that time gave me the idea for a narrative that I then fleshed out musically.

I freed myself of the constraints of having to be able to perform the music alone and wrote it much more like an actual film score for a mid-size ensemble. Visuals still very much guided the mood of the new music only, this time, the visuals existed only in my mind.

We recently released two visualizers which explore some of the story’s themes.

For you to get started, do there need to be concrete ideas – or what some have called a ‘visualisation’ of the finished work? What does the balance between planning and chance look like for you?

That’s interesting. In the case of The Bloodwren, there was a loose narrative arc I had in mind that acted like a skeleton over which I built the music.

As per normal with me, though, the actual beginning of generating the music came from just sitting down with a guitar and mucking around trying to accommodate the feel of specific imagery had in mind. Each composition on the LP differs a little bit in terms of how specific I was in composing to the narrative.

For instance, “Falter” was composed like an actual film score with every second of music corresponding to a very specific script I wrote out.



On the other extreme is “Platonic Forms,” where I tried to us a long connected musical structure to describe lots of little narrative vignettes.



On that piece you get lots of changes in mood and style, almost like watching a stream of TikTok vids that are related thematically but wildly different in approach.

Is there a preparation phase for your process? Do you require your tools to be laid out in a particular way, for example, do you need to do research or create early versions?

I’m not super particular about things like this but I do need a few things to begin. I need my guitar, usually my trusty Gypsy Jazz acoustic, which is so versatile it can emulate a variety of different guitars and allows for fast dexterous playing like on an electric.

I also need my large Yeti mug full of Japanese sencha, during the day, or a tumbler with a bit of good bourbon, at night. On top of that I always have staff paper and either my laptop or iPad running notation software on hand in case an idea falls from the ether.

Do you have certain rituals to get you into the right mindset for creating? What role do certain foods or stimulants like coffee, lighting, scents, exercise or reading poetry play?

I very much prefer to compose outside. I like to sit on my patio with my guitar and staff paper or laptop and just get lost for hours building. My wife designed a beautiful outdoor space which I really vibe with.

The music usually starts with a guitar-derived pattern or harmonic structure, which I’ll then deconstruct and assign to individual string parts or maybe piano. Once I have an idea like that in place I’ll play with variations and repetitions using different compositional techniques I’ve developed which can take the pieces in sometimes surprising, sometimes disastrous, directions that I can keep building from or tear down and start over.

But somehow being outside just opens me up in ways that I can’t get to inside. Unfortunately, I live in a climate which only allows for outside writing a handful of months a year.

I still write indoors but tend to gravitate more to experimenting with euro rack modular synthesis or working on technique when confined to my studio.

What do you start with? And, to quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

For me it always feels like discovery. Composing almost always begins with random noodling on guitar with a certain image, or feel in mind. When I come up with something I like it always seems like I just stumbled upon it.

Once the core idea is there, developing it can feel much more like creation, although, like I mentioned above, sometimes the compositional tricks and tools I have developed lead me places that are totally surprising and, again, can feel like uncovering something that was lurking just beyond my discernment.

Many writers have claimed that as soon as they enter into the process, certain aspects of the narrative are out of their hands. Do you like to keep strict control or is there a sense of following things where they lead you?

My music is instrumental but still heavily reliant on narrative and always has been. For this record I had a very specific storyline in mind before I started building the music so the direction was mostly in my hands. But the way the music expressed the story was very much fluid and often surprising to me.

That said there were times when scoring specific scene where the process kind of reversed itself and a musical idea led to the further development or outright change of the narrative.

A good example of this is the beginning of “The Bloodwren,” which was composed after the rest of the piece was finished. I attached it to the beginning to introduce a new character its mood inspired.



Often, while writing, new ideas and alternative roads will open themselves up, pulling and pushing the creator in a different direction. Does this happen to you, too, and how do you deal with it? What do you do with these ideas?

This frequently plagues me. On one of the album’s compositions, “Platonic Forms,” I just decided to go with it and not fight those frequent urges to change direction.

If that meant Steve Reich-like minimalism feeding into a fanfare then erupting into driving rock followed by an abstract groove and so on, then so be it.

There are many descriptions of the creative state. How would you describe it for you personally? Is there an element of spirituality to what you do?

There is a state I have heard described as “flow” which every once in a while, I’m lucky enough to enter some approximation of I think.

Once I have a worthy idea and the right ingredients start to gel composing can feel very much like meditation where I get completely swept up in the process and before I know it, several hours have passed, I’ve forgotten to eat, have to pee really bad, the sun is going down and I’ll have this new thing in front of me.

While I’m in that state the blue print for how I’m building a piece will be perfectly clear, but often when I try to understand what I did after the fact I’ll be totally in the dark. The slightest interruption can pull me out and make it impossible to get back to the clarity I had for how things were going to develop.

When you are in the studio to record a piece, how important is the actual performance and the moment of performing the song still in an age where so much can be “done and fixed in post?“

The important part about the performance is the attitude, articulations and delivery. If things are a bit pitchy or stray from tempo it can easily be fixed later, but the sensitivity or ferocity of the performance and how things like glissandos are performed is impossible to convincingly doctor in post.

For this record almost everything you hear was played exactly as I wrote it the exception being the drums. In many places I outlined a groove or feel but I had such trust in my long-time friend and collaborator Devin Drobka and, The National drummer Bryan Devendorf that I just had them do their thing.

I am beyond thrilled with the results and in certain places what they did completely changed what I was imagining for the better.

Once a piece is finished, how important is it for you to let it lie and evaluate it later on? How much improvement and refinement do you personally allow until you’re satisfied with a piece? What does this process look like in practise?

This is my Achilles heel. I am an endless tinkerer and can easily get lost in the process forever. I have learned that I have to write everything out and create strict parameters, or I will get swept up in plasticity and never get anywhere.

I now make myself notate or record every possibly usable idea, or that idea is certain to get lost simply as matter of evolution as I continue to explore it. That way I can still mine and develop the idea but can always return to the original, which is often the best version of itself.

The same thing goes when writing larger pieces. Having everything committed to a master score allows me to still come back and change or refine things—or even radically alter its structure— without being completely open-ended about what the piece is and always having the core idea intact.

Even recording a solo song is usually a collaborative process. Tell me about the importance of trust between the participants, personal relationships between musicians and engineers and the freedom to perform and try things – rather than gear, technique or “chops” - for creating a great song.

Working with Peter Katis as producer/engineer has been amazing. From the get go we were quick to develop a working process that has been super fruitful and efficient.

I arrive at the studio with the tracks fleshed out with sampled instruments playing MIDI conversions of my notation as well as scrub guitar tracks I record at home. We then go about replacing each synthetic track with actual players and instruments one by one.

Eric Sanderson from The Augustines become key to the process as he’s a wiz at sound design. We experimented with doubling or replacing various parts with synths and Eric was brilliant at coaxing interesting sounds from analogue gear. This created a lot of ear candy you can hear with close listening, especial in the Dolby Atmos mixes.

What’s your take on the role and importance of production, including mixing and mastering for you personally? In terms of what they contribute to a song, what is the balance between the composition and the arrangement?

Without solid mixing and mastering the energy, mood and nuances of a song can get completely lost or fall flat. My music is very dense and multi-layered, so it’s not easy to get everything playing well together to create a sonic unity, but Peter is a master and nails it with the stereo mixes.

But because of the instrumental and compositional density of The Bloodwren’s music we decided to also mix it in Dolby Atmos, which is a state-of-the-art audio format that has been adopted by Apple Music and others as the future of listening experience.

Famed audio engineer, Dave Way, did the Atmos mixes and they sound massive. I hear things in Atmos that I forgot were there in the original recordings. I’m a true believer in this format and hope it really catches on.

[Read our Bob Clearmountain interview about Atmos]

After finishing a piece or album and releasing something into the world, there can be a sense of emptiness. Can you relate to this – and how do you return to the state of creativity after experiencing it?

I can definitely relate. The first record was meant to capture the feel of the live shows and I had no plans to ever record as Ceiling Spirits again. After getting some nice reviews and listener response it did feel a bit like a let-down when things moved on—as they do at a million miles per hour now.

I’m still in the process of rolling out this record so I’ll try to keep the inevitable let down at bay for a while. For now the response has been incredible and that feels good.

Music is a language, but like any language, it can lead to misunderstandings. In which way has your own work – or perhaps the work of artists you like or admire - been misunderstood? How do you deal with this?

Music is a language but it is also highly interpretive and subjective. As someone who writes and records instrumental music, I’m less concerned with people missing the emotional or narrative point I had in mind and just want it to meaningful to people in whatever way serves them best.

The music has been described in the press in ways I totally don’t get but rather than being upset by that I try to take it as perhaps people are seeing things in it that I don’t and that’s ok with me. If the music got described as pop-county, or something, I might take issue but who am I to say someone is wrong to hear “post-folk” in what I do?

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. Do you personally feel as though writing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn’t or wouldn’t in more mundane tasks?

Earlier we discussed how the act of writing music is more like discovery than creation for me. I can’t think of a mundane task that feels the same way.

There is the technical aspect to composing, which is inherent in any task, with varying complexity, but there is also this weird sense that music comes to me rather than is created within me. I never get that feeling when making dinner though I’m certain some people do.