Part 2
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your sounds, pieces, or live performances that's particularly dear to you, please?
My work for Room40, Nessun Legame con la Polvere, comes with a booklet attached to the CD featuring an insight on my creative process, which unfolds through four distinct phases that often blend and intermingle.
(1) Free improvisations with objects, microphones, and electronic devices, all recorded in stereo and frequently quite chaotic. (2) The recorded materials are then randomly superimposed, allowing for potential interactions and divergences between sounds to emerge. This phase continues indefinitely and usually remains prominent until the work nears completion. (3) After that, I gradually refine the formless and chaotic material, cutting it into shorter fragments and reducing it until an interesting dialogue between the parts takes shape.
(4) The final stage is arguably the most critical, involving an extended period of rest for the work—weeks or even months. This hiatus allows for what I refer to as "virgin listening”, thanks to that I become a listener of my own work rather than its composer. Forgetting the details of the creation process, such as how and when the work was crafted, becomes vital for emotional detachment, letting the piece acquire new layers of meaning.
The temporal and spatial dimensions of sound creation differ markedly from those of sound enjoyment. All these phases operate within an open, ongoing process and I don’t really think of my music as something finished. My compositions have no beginning or end. They are always open, ready to be reborn in a new life. In the process of composing a piece, I'm merging various elements from diverse sources and temporalities into a new space-time with the specific aim of building new relationships, like soil in a continuous process of transformation thanks to the cooperation between fungi, animals and chemical reactions.
Relationship is the key word in what I do. Live performances are quite similar but more structured as I have to deal with various contexts and time limitation. I basically try to establish a possible (and still, open) dialogue between sounds of my library. Some weeks prior to the concert I re-listen to them and create a map for improvisation. All the info about the space and venue come into play.
In relation to sound, one often reads words like “material”, “sculpting”, and “design”. How does your own way of working with sound look like? Do you find using presets lazy?
The core of my work lies in sculpting raw material from free improvisations or recordings of objects and empty/quiet spaces. As I mentioned, there’s a strict analogy between the realm of fungi and my artistic practice. I envision my compositions as sensory environments, organic architectures where new relationships, resonances and connections emerge. It’s about dealing with the vitality of recorded material, which is far more than invariable files.
Things of the world we are constantly interacting with change based on our feelings, emotion, light, temperature. The world is never static even when it seems to be, so neither is sound. It’s a matter of with which scales we are observing and sensing the world.
A turning point in my life was the book The Order of Time by Italian physician Carlo Rovelli, where he offers a new, extraordinary perspective in which he thinks the world as “long events”, durational entities. In his words:
“A good scientific theory […] should not be about how things are, or what they do: it should be about how they affect one another. […] It pushes us to rethink reality in terms of relations instead of objects, entities or substances”.
Like some mushrooms, whose function of decomposition, regeneration and recycling produces fertile soil, my sounds live in a never-ending timeline, often on the verge of rebirth and transformation. It is as if they were stem cells, not yet specialised, but capable of differentiating themselves according to the context they are in.
To some, the advent of AI and 'intelligent' composing tools offers potential for machines to contribute to the creative process. What are your hopes, fears, expectations and possible concrete plans in this regard?
Before answering your question I would like to tell you what “intelligence” means to me. The concept of intelligence can be seen as a shared endeavour across various forms of life. Intelligence, broadly defined as the capacity to acquire and apply knowledge, solve problems, and adapt to new situations, is not limited to humans alone.
People too often misinterpret intelligence with something which makes things better, easier or quicker for us. That’s not intelligent, that’s convenient. Can you imagine how much effort we put into training machines whereas we could explore our inner potential? That’s crazy. Do we need the AI because we are experiencing a creative and identity crisis? That’s what I feel sometimes.
Emotions belong to an ancient brain – which we have in common with animals – that have helped human beings not to become extinct. For instance, fear is an immediate response to an environmental stimulus from which you defend yourself, and this is positive.
In the era of technology emotions struggle to live. Technology is the highest form of rationality ever achieved by man. It accomplishes the maximum of goals with the minimum of means. Anything that slows this process down is no longer interesting. Very often, I believe in most cases, technology does not aim at improvement but at self-enhancement. How do you explain that Bernard Parmegiani in De Rerum Natura did an incredible job using machines that today at a technological level seem ridiculous?
Efficiency, productivity, speeding up time are far faster than the time capacity of our psyche. Italian philosopher and psychoanalyst Umberto Galimberti says that we are now operators of apparatuses. Emotions are a disturbance to functionality.
That being said, I am not against anything. I simply do not find the AI in art interesting in many many cases. It doesn’t really speak to us, but of course it depends on how it’s used. I believe there are amazing artists out there that use this technology without pointing the focus on the technology itself just for the sake of employing it.
How important is sound for our overall well-being and in how far do you feel the "acoustic health" of a society or environment is reflective of its overall health? What importance does silence hold in this regard from your point of view?
In the contemporary world there’s no room left for rest as we are constantly bombarded and anaesthetised by visual and acoustic stimuli.
In 2009, a study by the University of California, San Diego reported that the average American consumes 34 gigabytes of content and 100,000 words of information in a single day. Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace is 460,000 words long. That doesn’t mean we read 100,000 words a day, but 100,000 words cross our eyes and ears in a single 24-hour period.
The amount of sound information happening simultaneously in our lives is impressive. The information comes through various channels, including television, radio, web, text messages, and video games resulting in a disruptive noise, an indistinguishable and unpleasant hurricane of information investing our senses.
The hard lifestyle which some cities are known for (NYC, Tokyo, Shanghai) seems to make people so busy that they have no time to meet anymore. Most of them are alone (and more likely they don’t even know it). Doesn’t this contrast with our biology? “No man is an island” Thomas Merton would say. How could you have room for others if your cup is completely full?
Our inner time, which is the result of years of evolution, is completely threatened by the speed at which we live so that our lives have become unsubstantial and illusory. We often find ourselves driven to publish anything on the internet without thoughtful consideration, neglecting to discern what is truly good or bad for us and the others. This habit diminishes the intrinsic values of things, rendering them mere wares. This often translates in anguish for the future. We cannot really ignore this.
Tinnitus and developing hyperacusis are very real risks for anyone working with sound. Do you take precautions in this regard and if you're suffering from these or similar issues – how do you cope with them?
I luckily do not suffer from tinnitus even though from time to time, especially when I am stressed, I “hear” a hiss which goes away pretty quickly. I am not exposed to massive sound pressures luckily. I tend to listen to music at relatively low volume and push up the volume just when I am mixing my music.
Seth S. Horowitz called hearing the “universal sense” and emphasised that it was more precise and faster than any of our other senses. How would our world be different if we paid less attention to looks and listened more instead?
We would be more open to welcome the variety of intelligences populating our world.
