Name: Matteo Gualeni aka Missing Ear
Occupation: Producer, sound artist, sound designer, drummer, teacher
Nationality: Italian
Recent release: Missing Ear's Skyquakes is out via Mille Plateaux. A physical edition is being prepared for February 2023, but is available for pre-order.
Recommendations on the topic of sound: For sure I suggest Undead-Unsound. Definitely one of my favorite books about music and sound research. It’s very inspiring from many points of views: reflections on the nature of sound, how difficult and mysterious it can be, extreme events, reflections on sonic weapons …
I would also recommend reading "Arte, tecnologia e scienza. Le art industries e i nuovi paradigmi di produzione nella new media art contemporanea” by Marco Mancuso.
Or if you want to improve your hearing skills “Il paesaggio sonoro" by Raymond Murray Schafer.
Lastly, I would like to suggest this article written by Daniela Gentile.
If you enjoyed these thoughts by Missing Ear and would like to find out more about his work, visit him on Instagram, and twitter.
Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it? Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?
Well, for sure I can say that being a drummer has a lot of influence on my work … to give you an example, the massive use of sequencers related to rhythm, harmony and melody is an essential features of my practice.
However the most evident influence of being a drummer is reflected by my method of composition. It all starts this way: a note, a noise, a beat or a sample that I put through a sequencer and then play it. That is the most usual way I start to compose. Basically, everything I can put on a rhythmic sequencer is true love; the feeling of trying to figure out new and different patterns.
In this sense, I allow myself to be carried away towards a factual narrative flow (avoiding thinking with pre-set structures).
Another fundamental aspect of sound, and its power and fascination on me, is dimension. I'm referring to the power that sound has to generate an ambiance. This element is definitely the focus of my attention when I produce something (especially when I want to write ambient music).
As I said, this theme is central to my ambient compositions, such as those I published in 2021 via Mille Plateaux under the name Baransu (in collaboration with Micheal Barteloni): Atmospheric Landscape I & II.
Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?
We could talk for hours about Autechre, Alva Noto, Aphex Twin, or also bands like Radiohead, Depeche Mode, Boards of Canada, and many others. For different reasons, I found in these artists great forms of inspiration.
[Read our Alva Noto interview]
At the beginning of my journey (in electronic music) I was impressed by the amazing sound of Boards of Canada, "Everything you do is a balloon" is one of my fav tracks ... I'm still in love today with those synth textures! Coming from jazz studies that sound was so new and fresh to my ears.
Alva Noto (his first records), as well as Aphex Twin's IDM style had a huge impact on my ambient, glitch and electro imprinting. The absence of gravity in sharp contrast to the heavy use of bass, raw and well-designed sounds are important features of my musical expression.
I remember my first approach to DJing delved into their sounds but also into the techno world (I've always listened to artists like Donato Dozzy, Marco Shuttle, or Dasha Rush).
[Read our Marco Shuttle interview]
Even this culture affected my style. I've learned the importance of using the kick, glitch patterns, and timeless landscape sounds.
When did you start writing/producing/playing music and what or who were your early passions and influences? What was it about music and/or sound that drew you to it? What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?
I studied jazz drums for three years at the conservatory Luca Marenzio in Brescia and then attended the Giuseppe Verdi Conservatory in Milan to pursue studies in electronic music and sound design. This path allowed me to lay a solid foundation for many personal experiments, from jazz, techno, and ambient music, up to an audiovisual project (Baransu) between glitch and industrial music.
This path left its impact on me, and it is reflected in the inclination to incorporate a lot of improvisation into my compositional method (especially in the drumming). At the same time I was trying to not restrict my sound research, but rather expand the range towards different directions and approaches, more related to introspective storytelling.
Sometimes I like to explore more "academic" and research-oriented topics, such as ASA (auditory streams), which was back then, the subject of my thesis. This subject was extremely significant to my latest album Skyquakes, recently released on digital via Mille Plateaux.
What is most important, however, is that this set of influences should not accelerate or divert our path, but find its own time and shape our personality and thinking.
From the point of view of your creative process, how do you work with sounds? Can you take me through your process on the basis of a project or album that's particularly dear to you?
As you can hear in the track "37 years later", that kind of industrial and violent sound brought to me a new idea about a possible transformation of my acoustic drums.
As I said, I started as a drummer and I've always been looking for a way to evolve to an aesthetic that is more akin to my being today, that looks beyond the simple mechanics of the drum, the simple sound produced by the percussion of a drum. That record helped me to rethink a new rhythmic point of view.
Through "lost and found" however, I developed into maturation another theme that was essential to me: the absence of time and the dilation of the timeline.
I worked a lot on my pieces for sonic textures devoid of rhythmic references capable of transporting the listener from one state of being to another, or more simply letting him discover multiple levels of listening as well as achieving sonic awareness. (Active listening is at the core of my path as a musician and sound researcher)
I'm very attracted to this aspect because I have always had a very deep love for ambient music. In this new formula, full of synths and ethereal pads, I found a fertile and viable ground, rather than looking for additional effects and sounds capable of dilating the listening.
In this case I refer to the Floating Points track "Karakul", a key point for the writing of "Bodily Sounds.”
How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?
The connection I see is very subtle and is at risk of being misunderstood. But this is what I want to bet on: I’d like to try to bring listening more and more towards an active line, of resistance, of real networking, among us musicians and music lovers. In all of this, I connected science and research by studying and analyzing the process of listening to people.
"Listening is resistance" (manifesto of Skyquakes) is a sentence that a very dear friend of mine, Daniela Gentile, wrote in one of her essays titled "Listening as an Eco-Political Form of Resistance”. This statement helped me to develop a critical thinking, at the same time broader than the POV of the single release, trying to bring the whole project towards a solid identity. (The people around us are crucial ... to stir up ideas and feelings and devise larger projects. Moreover, this sense of "activation" is a much needed process on a social level, in my opinion.)
I couldn't say how much technique accompanies my work, but I certainly try to have "rules" that I like to refine more and more to characterize my language. (I am referring to the fact that I have not tied the structure of the songs to a necessarily "scientific" process.)
With my project I would like to draw more attention to the topic of Auditory Streams in a broader sense, and raise awareness. I would like to create a record for focused and active listening, for a human-human, not an algorithmic-human.
Because it is also an underground genre I hope to reach the right niche and share the message with people interested in this kind of subject, and music!
Where do you find the sounds you're working with? How do you collect and organise them?
I have always looked for sounds from different sources: digital or analog sound synthesis (also using legendary synths like the Minimoog or drum machines like the Vermona MKIII) and recordings of real instruments, such as drums, but not only.)
Another great thing about working on this album seemingly alone, is that I've done more collaborations than I've ever done before. On a couple of songs, Morgan Bosc was involved. He is a long time friend of mine, and mixing and mastering engineer, who lives in Amsterdam, and with whom I collaborated for two tracks of the album, "19 dB" and "Bodily Sounds", both recorded at the branch of the Abbey Road Studios in Amsterdam.
Other appearances were made by colleagues, friends and former conservatory classmates, Fabrizio Paggi, Carlo Manzan, Andrea Ragnoli, and the one with Maurizio Borgna, mixing and mastering engineer of 5 tracks on the album.
This experience led me towards a continual sound research, to a minimal but optimised setup. The studio machines that I use the most at the moment are: the Analog Four (Elektron), Vermona MKIII, Moog Grandmother, Nord Stage 3, and obviously Ableton as a DAW with its Push2.
How would you describe your development as an artist in terms of interests and challenges, searching for a personal voice, as well as breakthroughs?
Right now I understood that you have to choose. You can't think that everyone will like your music and it's also wrong to think that it can reach everyone.
To answer the question about how I approach my music and how I live this aspect ... when I was younger I thought I'd have ended up playing at every possible festival, but now, I'm interested in more specific goals: for example the Berlin Atonal, the MUTEK, Terraforma, and others, where the audience is there for the purpose of listening and enjoy music.
I have the same approach for my show The Missing Ear on Radio Raheem, where I'm trying to build a community with artists and people in the industry, sharing music and ideas. I believe that today this research is also dictated by the need to escape from social media (as interfaces for their own sake), in order to create a community that speaks the same language and wants to share the same things!
