Part 2

Could you accompany us through a day of your life, from a possible morning routine to your work?  Do you have a fixed schedule?  How do music and other aspects of your life feed into each other - do you separate them or do you try to blend them perfectly?
 
I am the least methodical person in the world. I don’t have any kind of routine. I am methodical in sports or in the technical exercises I do with the guitar, but not in life!  
I don't have a fixed alarm clock; my day is never the same and I like it. In general, I would like to be an early riser, but I don't always succeed.  But I can tell you that the first thing I have always done for some years as soon as I wake up – it can be 6 am or 10 am – is to meditate, and then have breakfast. Then anything can happen. In some months of the year I teach, I always try to read, almost every evening, when I am home, I watch a film with the projector. I do play, obviously, but not necessarily every day. There is no method or choice regarding music and other aspects of life. One could not exist without the others of course, everything merges in an organic way but I can't say how much my interest in music is greater than my interest in reading, for example.  Music is what I know how to do, it has always been my language, a language that has already gone through many metamorphoses up to now. I don't think music has ever been separated from the rest, indeed it has always been, and continues to be, influenced and conditioned by what I read, who I speak to, what movies or shows I've watched.  
In recent years my inspirational models, if we can say so, are no longer other musicians. Obviously, I have musicians that I love and admire very much, but they are not my inspiration.
 
Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece or an album that is particularly dear to you, please?  Where did the ideas come from, how were they transformed in your mind, what did you start with and how do you refine these beginnings into the finished work of art?
 
Each work is different, and the creative process that behind it depends on what inspired it.  
It comes natural to me to talk about my recent album, I Should Have Been a Gardener, released just a month ago on Die Schachtel. It is a work totally inspired by the English director Derek Jarman, his diaries and his garden. The previous album, Fassbinder Wunderkammer, was inspired by the German cinema director, and by the music in his films - all composed by the same author, Peer Raben.  
This work on Jarman is completely different, it was not his cinema that inspired it - a cinema that I love very much - but the reading of his diaries, which Jarman wrote in the last years of his life:  Modern Nature and Smiling in Slow Motion.  
When Jarman discovered he was HIV-positive, he decided to buy a small cottage in Kent, in Dungeness, a place on the edge of the world, a lunar landscape where fishermen's cottages alternate one after the other without fences. On the ground only shingle, on one side the sea, on the other side a huge gray, fascinating nuclear power station.  
Jarman was an expert gardener, and on that shingle he created one of the most poetic, splendid and surprising gardens of the last century.  He said: “The borders of my garden are the horizon.”  Jarman was an incredible man who decided to share with others his private life, the disease, the garden, and even his diaries, which he wrote knowing that they would be published.
Modern Nature came out while he was still alive. I have read it several times and often, just to find comfort and consolation, I open the pages randomly and always find something that inspires me, moves me, amuses me, touches me deeply like nothing written has ever done before.  The garden is there, of course, but there is also the courage of a man who is about to die and who is surprised to be happy even in the hardest moments; a man who creates among the shingle one of the most beautiful and surprising gardens of the 1900s. Those who deal with plants know that time is what’s needed most to see results, something he no longer had. There is his political commitment, passionate and anger at the punishments that the heterocentric culture has inflicted and continues to inflict on those who are not straight.
There is the story of his work, cinema, works of art like paintings and sculptures; there is friendship, love and sex. And there is literary beauty, otherwise all this would not reach the reader.
I spent almost two years immersed in his world, I read everything he wrote, I saw everything he shot, and slowly the idea of translating all this into music sprouted within me. It was a very slow process, many ideas were sacrificed because I felt the need for a clean, stripped, meaningful and above all evocative result. I eliminated all the parts that felt too descriptive. I visited Prospect Cottage, walked around his house and recorded my steps - that in fact open the album and still today, when I play this piece “April 21”, and I hear those steps, I feel I am there walking; I feel his presence.
The music that most helped me to evoke all the beauty and yearning that Jarman evokes in me was Vivaldi's “Stabat Mater”, so I made my own version.  
There is a piece that Jarman mentions in his diaries, “The Wound Dresser” by John Adams, which he listened to it coming from the house while he was gardening; he was moved by it because the baritone voice sings the words of a very painful poem by Walt Whitman; so, I played my version of this music. I tried to compose a portrait that included various aspects of his life. There is also a version of “It's a Sin” by the Pet Shop Boys, because Jarman made the video for that song.
 
There are many descriptions of the ideal state of mind to be creative.  How is it for you?  What supports this ideal state of mind and what are distractions?  Are there any strategies to enter this state more easily?
 
This is a very complex question because I don't think I can identify my ideal state of mind for being creative. I don't have a method for being creative! In my case, two or three years may pass between one album and the next. I have no interest in making records with the first ideas that come to me. If I think about my last work, for example, the months spent under the influence of my research on Jarman were more creative on an existential level than the moment when I translated all the baggage I had brought into music. So, no strategy. I'm just listening.
 
How is playing live and writing music in the studio connected?  What do you get and draw from each experience personally?  How do you see the relationship between improvisation and composition in this regard?
 
This question is also complex for me because my production is so varied that I cannot draw a single conclusion or thought from it. I can say that I do not particularly enjoy the moment of recording. When the work is designed and written, the time to fix it and record it seems almost superfluous to me. Of course, I know I have to do it, and I do record it, but there is no excitement in that phase because the interesting things have already happened in my head.  
Playing live is definitely more vital for me, even if in the course of life my state of mind, the reasons why I do it, the relationship between me, the audience, the performative dimension, are evolving. Just recently, while I was playing I Should Have Been a Gardener live, I almost wished I was not there; wished to be an intangible, and invisible presence; I wished that the people who were there, instead of watching me playing, saw Derek Jarman walking in his garden.
It is a sensation that I like very much. It is as if I had freed myself a little from the anxiety of performing. Mine is not an improviser training, even if improvisation was fundamental for me to free myself from all the rigidities and closures that are inevitably part of every classical musician. I fear that I will never be able to get rid of this heritage completely, but I don't mind because it is part of me and of a story that I have built with my hands, with my conscious choices, through personal research and encounters.
 
How do you see the relationship between the "sound" aspects of music and the "compositional" aspects?  How do you work with sound and timbre to satisfy certain production ideas and how can certain sounds already take on compositional qualities?
 
Music and sound for me are exactly the same thing. To me, it is unthinkable to separate them.  In the sound there is the voice of a musician, there is everything that identifies her/him, there is poetry, there is direction, there is inspiration. There is everything. Sound is music, and music is sound.

Our sense of hearing shares intriguing connections with other senses.  From your experience, what are some of the most stimulating overlaps between the different senses and what do they tell us about the way our senses work?  What happens to the sound at its outermost borders?
 
I confess that I have never asked myself this question, and no matter how hard I try to find an interesting answer, nothing comes to my mind.
 
Art can be a purpose in its own right, but it can also directly feed everyday life, take on a social and political role and lead to greater involvement.  Can you describe your approach to art and being an artist?
 
I don't perceive being a musician as a job, but as something in which I can channel my life. And this absolutely does not mean that “music is my life”: on the contrary, I believe that this statement is very far from me. I have reached an age where I begin to ask myself how I came to be what I am today in relation to my childhood, which is probably the moment in life, albeit in an unconscious way, where the desire for how we would like our future takes shape.
I believe that dealing with art in a serious and sincere way, whether it is music, figurative art, cinema, theatre or whatever you prefer, has the purpose, more or less conscious, of raising and improving the human condition. I approached music not because I had a particular gift or a particular transport towards it, but because in that period, the one in which you still act under the influence of things and people that you have not really chosen to be with (up to thirteen years, you still live in both territorial and human areas that do not really belong to you), it happened that through my studies and personal encounters, I felt that music would be a way to find a path of knowledge of myself and by myself - a  road that would take me to other places both physical and mental. Now this is clear to me. My childhood and adolescence - which were very beautiful and full of epiphanies, words and encounters - I remember them as little lights that have traced a path for the existential research I am still following.
I think I was then what I am today, and I believe it is still a choice. Being a musician today, means I keep looking for myself and more happily because it’s a more conscious process towards the path of self-discovery, of discovery of others and the world - a process which I hope will elevate myself as a human being.

It is extraordinary, in a sense, that we have arrived in the 21st century with the basic concept of music still intact.  Do you have a vision of music, an idea of what music could be beyond its current form?
 
Music is indissolubly part of the human history. Understanding why primitive people needed to draw/reproduce figures with marks on surfaces, or why they started to beat stones to produce the first rhythms, used the voice as first melodic lines, or danced - this remains one of the most fascinating mysteries! I cannot see music beyond its current form, I do not see why I should. Humanity has created an archive that includes the memory of a millennia of music, so that today we can have an extremely broad vision of what music has represented for the human species. We have a vision that makes us dizzy because it is so vast.
For me the future does not exist, I do not desire it. I live here and now and live in the music that flows through me. The rest would be just chatter. To put it in Shakespearean terms, the rest is silence.