Cassandra Voices

Tag: cassandra voices musician of the month

  • Musician of the Month: Shortsleeve Conor

    Shortsleeve Conor was born in Lisbon, but started playing in Aberdeen when I was a 21-year-old pizza chef. One Sunday, after finishing the close, the team headed over to a pub nearby called the Prince of Wales. We walked through the double doors to be met by the most joyous music I’d ever experienced. Fiddles, banjos, guitars, loud chattering, singing, tin whistles, flutes, pints pouring and a saxophone. I fell in love with trad and folk music right then.

    My family is Irish, though I grew up in the U.K. on the Wirral, so I already knew the music but hadn’t really experienced it. I was at that time a DJ playing house and disco. Now I decided folk music was something I wanted to pursue. The next week I brought my guitar to the session and asked if I could join in. Everyone was really nice and I think I sang Raglan Road or something. I listened to lots of the Dubliners, the Pogues, Margaret Barry, Hamish Imlach and the Fureys around that time.

    There was a fella who played in the session called Sandy Cheyne, who I now know is an artist and brilliant banjo picker. He soon showed me it was more useful to play a five-string than a guitar in this environment, because there are so many of the latter to compete with.

    He encouraged me to adapt old Scottish tunes to be played on the five-string banjo. Sandy had a huge influence on my musical direction. I started listening to all sorts of country music and learnt about the roots it had in Scottish and Irish.

    I listened to lots of on musicians like Bob Dylan, Dock Boggs, Ola Belle Reed, Jean Ritchie, Doc Watson, Clarence Ashley, Nathan Abshire and too many other names to mention. But it was the trad session approach to music which had the biggest influence on me.

    I learned how to entertain a crowd, often using humour in the songs. It also showed me how to be vulnerable with my writing. Things I like to talk about in my songs are non-traditional relationships, mental health issues, class politics and the end of the world. Also love. Lots about love.

    I moved to Lisbon to study in 2021 and did what I always did when I moved to a new place: looked for the music. Funnily enough the only Irish trad session in town was a five-minute walk from my new home.

    By then I had a few songs under my belt and wanted to take them to some open mics. I was then introduced to a musician called the Mighty String at the city’s oldest open mic in a nice venue called Camones. We decided to do some terracing – where you busk to tables at restaurants – and became mates. He sat me down one day and told me I need a new name. Conor Riordan was too difficult to pronounce over there and he’d always noticed I wore short sleeve t-shirts. Shortsleeve Conor was born.

    I’m a really lucky person. When things are not meant to work out they usually do. So when I moved to Lisbon I wasn’t expecting there to be a blossoming folk music scene I could jump straight into. But I soon made a great group of friends, who all happened to be excellent musicians.

    I’m also really lucky that I didn’t have to pursue the Shortsleeve project too hard. Gigs just seemed to happen and the response was generally encouraging. But there was always one problem question: “Have you got any of your music online?” I didn’t and I didn’t really have a plan to. But I had a friend who had just decided to start a record label to capture this special moment in the city’s cultural history.

    Cheap Wine Records was founded by Lee Squires with the ambition of promoting Lisbon’s folk music scene. It also aims to nurture future talent, showcasing their work so they can tour and go on to bigger things. Shortsleeve Conor was one of the first projects, so again I was very lucky.

    The album – ‘Whatever that means’ – was put together at Estudio Roma 49 in Lisbon, with my friends and fellow musicians coming together to make it happen. The same goes for the production, marketing and funding. This community-led approach to the music made me feel right at home. It’s the same mindset as being back in the Prince of Wales, sitting in a circle playing tunes over a few pints. Only now I was blessed with a hot Portuguese sun, instead of the freezing North Sea winds.

    I’m writing this the day the Doomsday Clock moved 90 seconds closer to midnight, the closest it’s ever been. It doesn’t feel like there’s a lot going on in the world to be happy about. But being from northern England I have to find what’s funny in everything. It takes the edge off. That’s why in my writing I contrast the rise of fascism with not being able to get a parking space in my song Pink Champagne. That’s why my song about being in an abusive relationship is so upbeat.

    I like to write about these things, but to add some humour into them. It helps because I also really struggle to express how I feel, which can be really frustrating when I’m in a relationship. I’m only at my most vulnerable when I’m telling an audience how I feel about someone who should have heard it first. I really try to leave nothing to the imagination with lyrics.

    Now my album is out I don’t really know what to do. I hope to use it to travel with my music and meet new people. When we started this record project the Mighty String asked me to write down what my long-term goal was for the album. I said I’d like for it to be well appreciated in a small but enthusiastic audience so I could disappear into anonymity without worrying about it too much and become a furniture painter or something. Then in forty years I’d like for it to be rediscovered and for it become a country classic so I can go on tour with it globally in my seventies.

    Follow Shortsleeve Conor on Spotify.

     

  • Musician of the Month: Cara Coyle

    The music I am performing at the moment mostly came from three different sets of songs that I began writing in 2018. The first batch I wrote when I was living in a small cabin my dad built near my family home in Donegal.

    At the time, I felt the songs come to me and I just wrote them down. I never experienced songwriting like that before. I did write in my early twenties, but It felt different with these songs.

    Since then, another batch of songs came to me in 2020 just after Covid hit. I realised that each set of songs felt that they had their own colours. The early batch felt black with bits of white. So I refer to them as the black and white songs. The songs that arrived in May of 2020 are mostly orange and my most recent songs have mostly been pink. I’ve got lots of pink songs.

    Sharing Music

    I never meant to share my music with others in the way that I am now. I was quite wary of doing so for a long time. If I shared them it was just for the fun of playing and experimenting with friends.

    There are two acts that currently inspire me to write and perform my music to others – Rónán Ó Snodaigh and Shakalak.

    At the moment I feel particularly moved by live music and feel very lucky that my favourite acts are Irish. When I go and see Rónán or Shakalak perform I want to go straight home afterwards and make something new to share. They make me feel like strengthening my inner voice and using it more.

    Their example shows how transformative live music can be and each time I’ve heard them perform I feel that I have learnt something new about myself or about the world we’re in. They remind me that music can bring us closer together. That we are all going through similar things in different ways, and we can relate to each other through our art. They continuously inspire me to bring what I have inside of me out into the world.

    Returning to Dublin

    When I came to Dublin in 2018 – having spent two years in Donegal – I began playing my music at open mic nights in the city. This helped me to integrate back into city life. I didn’t realise it would take a while for Dublin to feel like a home again.

    Playing in venues helped me connect with others and so began the feeling of community. One of the most valuable rewards of playing music has been witnessing the community that comes with it and watching that community grow. I have got to meet so many beautiful people and feel genuinely supported and encouraged by them.

    During Covid – whenever it was possible to do so – I began to play my orange tunes with a talented and intuitive drummer, Jason McNamara. Last year I was granted an Agility Award and with it I wrote more pink tunes.

    It was strange for me to sit down and say “ok, I need to write some songs” because prior to this the songs came about very naturally. It worked out though, and I’m currently enjoying hearing these songs grow legs and arms and gain a life of their own on the stage.

    Self-Expression

    Rather than pursuing music as a career, I have always just been interested in music as a way to express myself. It’s an art form for me. I feel I get to see myself grow through making art in ways that I might not find the space for in day-to-day life.

    Performing live is what I enjoy most. I did a small bit of work in theatre in the past and loved that a play would be this live, living and breathing thing for a little while.

    It existed just for the people who showed up to see it and then it would be gone. I often feel that my music was written as if it were made for the theatre stage.

    For years I have played music on the street for fun, and for experience. There, I learned how to project my voice; perform with confidence; receive a compliment; to be rejected; experiment with other artists; and connect with all kinds of people. A lot of my own music would have debuted on the streets of Dublin.

    Image: Daniele Idini

    On the Liffey

    Once Covid ended I started to make changes that meant I was playing my music to others quite frequently. In 2022 I was offered a beautiful gig that runs in the summer called ‘Music under the bridges’ by a company called City Kayaking.

    The gig usually starts under Capel Street Bridge where a group of people on kayaks gather to listen to a musician sitting on a little dingy under the bridge. The setting is just beautiful and different every time. Nature dictates the stage. Sometimes bringing sunlight that hits off the water and projects on to the arches. Sometimes you might catch a seal listening in. It’s magic no matter what the weather is like.

    The very kind and lovely thing about this company is that they hire artists to play their original music, which meant that I was suddenly playing my music to an audience on a weekly basis.

    From playing on the Liffey, things seemed to progress like a rolling stone. Next, I found myself playing at mini festivals and events in the city and beyond.

    I started to meet more artists and felt inspired to continue to create and find more ways to spend my time playing music in my days.

    At the beginning of this year I was introduced to the opportunity of playing music in nursing homes which I still do now on a regular basis. I was delighted to stumble into this area. It’s really grounding and the exchange with the people there can be very rewarding.

    At the moment I am considering some projects for 2024. I have a little studio in the city centre that I work away in. I haven’t recorded a lot of music yet since I’ve been more interested in performing live, but It seems it might be a next step for me.

    There’s talk of collaborating with an artist to make a music video for my song ‘Paper Thin Woman’ which would be magic! I’m starting to play with a wonderful bass player now as well as Jason on drums. This is new and exciting territory for me. I look forward to the adventure ahead!

    Follow Cara Coyle on Instagram.

  • Musician of the Month: Anne Drees

    What do you pay attention to when you listen to music? The lyrics and melody? The instrumentation and timbre? I hear the bass and rhythm. It’s challenging for me to remember lyrics. A beautiful bass enchants me, and the queen of the bass, of course, is the double bass. Still, it took me more than thirty years of making and listening to music until I finally played it myself.

    At the age of seven, I began to play the flute, and a year later, the clarinet in the local brass band in a southern German village right next to the River Rhine.

    With my first notes, I became a clarinetist in the youth brass band, in preparation for joining the adult brass band from the village a year later. Until the age of thirteen, I spent my Friday nights playing Volksmusik and marching music, as well as soundtracks from famous American movies.

    On weekends, we performed marches in other villages in the district, played music for birthdays, weddings, and funerals — all while wearing uniforms with badges on our chests. These events often involved a lot of alcohol, a repertoire of over one hundred pieces, and plenty of bonding time. I enjoyed it immensely; it felt like home!

    I believe this is where my love for the bass began. In a way, I’ve remained attached to this genre. Twenty years later in Berlin, I played the bass clarinet in a brass band.

    Sometimes More is Possible

    When I was thirteen, my family moved to a small town in northern Germany, which marked a significant cultural shift for me.

    It was also where my classical education began. I joined the youth symphony orchestra of the music school., and there I met Judith Retzlik, with whom I now play alongside Myriam Kammerlander in our band gerda vejle.

    My new clarinet teacher supported and encouraged me at every available opportunity, while a conductor showed me that sometimes more is possible than I initially thought. I began to professionalize myself, and the dream of playing the double bass started to take shape.

    However, another fifteen years passed by before the double bass finally entered my life: Driven by heartbreak, I bought a big and strong double bass with a heart in the bridge (thank you, Judith, for your encouragement), and since then, I’ve been the double bass player and sometimes a singer at gerda vejle.

    Together with Myriam and Judith, we are gerda vejle: a space for creativity, a creative home, and friendship. If you want to learn more about gerda vejle, you should read Myriam‘s text; I couldn’t have said it better.

    My role at gerda vejle is likely to provide a solid foundation for vocals, harp, and violin to rest upon. It’s wonderful to play multiple instruments that allow you to express different facets of yourself. The clarinet is my voice, and the bass is my body.

    In the early years of gerda vejle, I listened to a lot of music, mainly because I was responsible for music booking at a new large venue called silent green in Berlin. This time was intense, and there was little time for my own creativity, besides the band.

    Today I work as a systemic coach; and support individuals and groups usually from the creative industry in decision-making, change and search processes.

    Music and Motherhood

    Finding enough time for my own music-making has always been a challenge. It became even more demanding when I became a mother.

    Time became the most valuable resource. Unfortunately, it’s still the case that women, in particular, struggle to balance family and music. Creative processes and working conditions are not often child-friendly: concerts and rehearsals frequently occur in the evenings and on weekends when childcare services have already closed.

    Moreover, creative work demands full concentration and commitment, which can be challenging to maintain with children. This needs to change.

    Gerda Vejle at Vico, Dublin.

    The Oceanic Feeling and Baths in the Ocean!

    Just a few years ago, I learned from a friend about the concept that describes the feeling I had always been searching for. When I discovered it, it made me the happiest person, not only in life but especially in music: the oceanic feeling. I yearn to lose myself, vibrate, connect, and resonate—a physical experience that I find when I play and listen to music.

     In September, 2023, gerda vejle travelled to Ireland, and I became both an ocean swimmer and a resonating double bass player. The oceanic feeling was very close. Hopefully, there’s more of that to come in the future.

    Looking ahead, I hope that we, gerda vejle, will finally manage to record our music. Do any of you know a talented female producer? If so, please get in touch with us.

  • Musician of the Month: Magdalena Jacob

    My musical journey started with a lot of Church organ and Bohemian brass music in a tiny village in Bavaria –  and when I say village I really mean it.

    At the age of five I developed a desperate desire to learn the guitar, because my mum had one (for her kindergarten group and she knew about four chords). At the age of five I wanted to be exactly like my mum, a genius.

    After three years I hated the guitar because after too many odd versions of Beatles covers I was just really bored and annoyed. I quit because, in the mean time, I desperately wanted to learn a random brass instrument, which I never actually managed to do.

    This tiny village where I grew up in had an unwritten rule that every kid had to learn a brass instrument to later play in the local youth brass band, in order to be part of the game. I learned the guitar and later the bass, because my dad was desperately looking for a bass player for his church band, so I was rather out of the game (and it’s nice to be able to blame the string instruments for it instead of myself).

    As a child I didn’t really think about becoming a musician. I didn’t think it was a real job anyway. I wanted to become a vet, then a kindergarten teacher, then a writer – which somehow I considered a real job.

    That one person at the party nobody gets…

    As long as I can remember, I have always been that one person at the party nobody gets. According to certain rumours, some believed I was a genius. Others were convinced that I was just really high (yes, even as a child).

    Once I came dressed up to a costume party as a tasteless dressmaker. It was supposed to be funny, but in the end people just thought I was mental.

    If a costume is too close to reality, people tend to confuse it for reality. And then the costume fails and protects me at the same time. The perfect illusion is to create a mask that looks exactly like your real face. It’s still a mask then. But it’s also a protective shield. And it’s still you, right?

    At the age of eleven I re-discovered the guitar because we randomly founded a band at some children’s birthday party of a friend in order to be cool or something, and I started to compose a couple of love songs about a guy I was pretending to be in love with at the time.

    Ten years later I moved to Berlin to become a full-time musician. I married my band mate at the time and we moved into a tiny room in a flat share together. I was actually more like a half-time busker, half-time film student and the weekends we spent touring (mostly hitchhiking) around Germany, busking and playing in bars as a guitar-duo that played sad, experimental guitar music for two guitars.

    After three years we broke up and I became a full-time film student and started to produce electronic pop music with weird spoken word elements. I was twenty-five and I felt like starting a completely new life.

    The gay clown on the moon…

    I recently came out as a clown which is due to the fact that I can’t take myself seriously any longer. How could I write sad, dramatic poems and scream them into the world when everything my white privileged ass can possibly emotionally understand are luxury problems?

    I made myself comfortable with being ridiculous and it was quite a liberation to be stupid, and not to expect anyone to take myself seriously anymore.

    My music now is sad, but funny. It’s cute. Still a lot of people don’t get it and sometimes they leave the room during concerts because I’m making fun about stuff that isn’t funny to them.

    Sometimes they insult me because in their ears, I’m not doing music. Which is true, because what I’m actually doing is theatre, or some kind of performance art that people would watch at night time on Arte, and be like “what the hell made her become like that?”.

    I sometimes ask myself the same question. But I realized people are mostly not really interested in honest answers.

    Therapy

    Music is therapy and I will make the audience my therapists as long as someone is willing to listen to my random brainfarts. Sometimes I’m scared that if too many people start listening to me I will never shut the fuck up ever again. And I’m also scared they would all just stop listening completely at some point.

    Sometimes living in Berlin is scary. The city is so loud because everyone is trying to find someone to listen to them.  And nobody is possibly getting enough of the attention they deserve. And unlike the village: most people are not trying to hide their problems from anyone. I mean, why should they do so?

    Life makes no sense in a city like that and is beautiful and liberating (in summer), but it’s also random and scary (in winter).

    I’ve recently become a half-time film maker, a half-time musician and a babysitter and a cat and a dog sitter, and a clown.

    Sometimes I’m not sure if I can ever go back to a serious approach to making music. Parts of me just always want to remain a clown on a tiny stage that creates something weird and funny and magical in the moment.

    Parts of me want to be an accordion-playing clown with an orchestra on their back, performing slutty lyrics in a church and crying all the time on stage. Parts of me also just want to become insta-famous or a tik-tok-star or this weird actress that is doing kind of everything and nothing at the same time and no-one knows what she’s actually famous for.

    What I want to achieve next is to move to space and live-stream arthouse cinema from the moon. Make friends with many more cats. Grow my own potatoes and save the world by growing potatoes.

    Generally saving the world would be great actually. Maybe that’s also possible from my treehouse on the moon.

    www.solarpoweredmoontown.de

    https://www.instagram.com/solarpoweredmoontown/

  • Musician of the Month: Barry O’Halpin

    Wingform is an hour-long piece of music I composed for Crash Ensemble between 2017 and 2020. Scored for twelve musicians, it has four ensemble movements connected by my own solo electric guitar passages, which act as a kind of connective tissue for the whole body of the work. 

    Wingform – Barry O’Halpin & Crash Ensemble Bandcamp link

    In 2017 I was invited to join Crash as a Composer-in-Residence as well as an electric guitarist, after which Wingform was commissioned. Being embedded in the group and growing as a musician during that time has made it the largest and most personal piece of work I’ve ever put together. I’m fortunate to have been able to work so closely with a hugely talented, open-minded and creative ensemble of players, and to have the opportunity to push the boat out in my own approach to the electric guitar as a solo instrument and as voice within a modern chamber orchestra. 

    Beyond the raw sounds themselves, Wingform’s biggest influence is like that of a lot of art: that overwhelming feeling of awe that comes from being confronted with nature in all its beautiful and grotesque and serene and scary forms– especially from its more hidden corners – and wanting to somehow channel or rebuild those found natural sounds and structures through the medium of music. While this is destined to fail in any literal sense the moment it is mediated through humanity and technology, the hope is that some of that uncanny non-human musicality carries through into the final work, giving that mystic sense of having plugged into nature in some small way.

    The sonic seed of the piece is a short recording of a tiger mosquito swarm, stumbled upon at the beginning of the composition process. Putting aside initial preconceptions toward the sound and listening, you can hear in this mass of wing vibrations a strangely haunting, melancholy chord. Providing the root note is an electrical hum which in most situations would be unwelcome, but here it creates a striking quality of animal merged with machine that captured my imagination.

    I scored out this wave-like, gliding mosquito chord for the instrumentation of Crash, in an approach borrowed from French spectral composition. I then messed around with the orchestration, creating all kinds of variations and contortions: glacial subterranean groans; double-speed Doppler flashes; delicate shimmers; and vertical chords broken into horizontal melodies. After workshopping and recording these with the players of Crash, they became the sonic palette that I would use throughout the whole piece, like a sort of shape-shifting  mantra.

    The piece as a whole tries to feel like a living breathing organism, and the electric guitar runs through and between movements like connective tissue. I constantly asked myself how could I make the guitar behave and sound less like itself and more like a piano or a percussion instrument, and embraced alternate tunings and unusual techniques to help unlock this. This went on to influence the winds, string, piano and percussion, which interacted with the strange sounds of the guitar to form new kinds of flavour combinations.

    The opening movement is a slow-burn: it’s based on the idea of a slowly descending line, introduced via slide guitar, that gradually unspools from high shimmers into a really big snaking melody. Ebbing and flowing below this, like a tide, are the mosquito chords.

    Movement II feels like faulty machinery reclaimed by nature. A tense and glitchy groove, played amazingly by pianist Máire Carroll, holds together a lattice of sounds. There are a lot of loops on the verge of collapse, and a sense of windows opening briefly into parallel musical worlds only to be slammed shut.

    Movement III also plays with loops on the edge of stability, and constant forward motion with a rickety handmade feel. It combines some nods to the language of jazz and post minimal music with more hard-edged and sometimes grotesque sounds, often playing with the contrast between them as if turning a dial to a point of intensity.

    The fourth movement is glacially slow, with a floating sense of grief to it, like the end of a life cycle for the organic whole. It’s an emotional and structural climax, bringing us right back to the original mosquito chord and finishing out on that initial electrical hum, the whole ensemble droning along with two oscillators.

    Wingform really brought together the various threads of my musical life like nothing else I’ve done: the hands-on, aural approach to electric guitar as my native instrument; the traditional composer’s sketches with pencil and manuscript paper; audio and MIDI collage on Logic software; and a constant back and forth dialogue between all of these things before the final project was typeset in score for players to make a reality. Going hand-in-hand with this is the hybridity of the sound world, which absorbs elements of many musical languages I’ve worked in over the years.

    Composing a score like this is a long, solitary process, and by its very nature you often have to take a leap of faith in believing that what you have written down will sound as good as your inner ear did when you imagined it, and that some of that magic gets through to listeners on a visceral level at the other end. This kind of music can be dense with a lot of moving parts, but for the audience it’s really there to be felt and experienced, not over-analysed.

    In my other experience as part of a band, there is always a collaborative mixer where everyone ends up giving feedback and co-authoring in real time, regardless of whose original demo was brought in. It’s different with a score like Wingform, where you are the sole composer, and more needs to be decided and structured before you ever send it to players, with whom time is scarce. The development workshops I did have with Crash players, who were totally supportive and engaged, were crucial not only for test-driving bits of material but also for keeping my morale alive.

    Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 (Image: Simon Marshall).

    Wingform was completed at the beginning of 2020, right as the pandemic was beginning and the certainty over when it would see the light of day suddenly evaporated. It was cruel timing, but the gut punch was softened by the solidarity with every musician internationally experiencing something similar. It was all the more cathartic when we premiered it streaming at New Music Dublin 2021, and this year with a live audience for the first time at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2022 followed by Crash’s 25th birthday celebrations in the National Concert Hall in Dublin. It’s also toured as an installation, created by video artist Jack Phelan (pictured).

    Installation, created by Jack Phelan (Image: Charlie Joe Doherty).

    By the time we reached the end of each performance, the drones vibrating through our bodies, it felt as if we as an ensemble had been through a long, vivid and disarmingly emotional journey, in the work itself and beyond. I hope that Wingform evokes something similar in listeners.

    Feature Image: Barry O’Halpin by Robert Watson.

  • Musician of the Month: Bróna McVittie

    I grew up in a rambling country house with damp bubbling from the walls and ghosts lurking in the locked rooms. It was big enough for a family of five to lose themselves, each in their own space, occasionally coming together for meals, but not needing to live in each others’ pockets.

    Just beyond the garden boundary were the ruins of an old mill, a remnant of the once thriving linen industry in Ulster. We used to collect frogspawn from the boggy patches there in old jam jars.

    Just beyond the mill walls was (and still is) the Fairy Glen along which we would traipse to primary school. We were always looking out for the fairies. Mum said that if you asked them nicely they would do things for you. So I started with wee things like ‘wake me up in time for school tomorrow’. And they always did. Somehow.

    Forestbrook House.

    Link for The Fairy Glen (Gleann Na Sidhe)

    We got evicted when I was eight-years-old and we moved to a Council House in a nearby estate, the only Protestant family.

    We had a mixed reception. Some friendly and a few spuds thrown at the window to keep us in check. One day our neighbour’s son stole my Dad’s bicycle, but we found it in a field down the way not too long after.

    I don’t recall those being the happiest of days. But four years later my Dad found an old rambling country house to rent, much like the one we’d lived in previously. And we moved.

    The landlord had left an old upright piano in the house and I was instantly smitten. This was where I experienced my first musical urges. I remember being inspired by Mum and Dad’s records, anything from Dolly Parton or Judy Collins was a hit. And Mum had a very cool African record by a band called Osibisa, who I’m very pleased to discover are still going.

    Drumsesk House.

    I got piano lessons from a local eccentric. He was surely more Norman Bates than Norman himself. His mother lived upstairs, although you never saw her. He had four different rooms with pianos. One for each season. His toupee was also changeable. He was an excellent teacher and I even managed to pass a few grades with his help.

    I had started clarinet lessons in school a few years previously, and although it didn’t feel like it at the time, this musical introduction had more than a little to do with my current preoccupation.

    Mr Green taught me how to play jazz clarinet, a very important part of which was keeping the foot tapping. As part of the deal of getting a clarinet ‘for free’ I had to go on Saturdays to play with the South Ulster Youth Band in Portadown. 7am Saturday starts on the bus weren’t popular with me at the time, but looking back on it, it was a tremendous thing for a young person to be involved with.

    It wasn’t until I was almost done with secondary school, and had fallen for a local outcast, musician and romantic, who was a few years my senior and very much ‘not what my parents wanted’, that I was inspired to pick up a guitar and compose.

    I’ll never forget my best friend crying when I played her my first song on the guitar. Only two chords; taught to me by my brother. That’s all I could play, but the lyrics were by W.B. Yeats – the chorus: “Had I the heaven’s embroidered cloths, Enwrought with gold(en) and silver light, The blue and the dim and the dark cloths, Of night and light and the half light.” And the sentiment was deeply earnest. I was in love. And there was no way to unfeel it.

    When I left high school I decided to delay a University degree and headed off to South America as part of an organised voluntary-work overseas initiative. I spent five months living in Ecuador teaching English to primary school children and working at an orphanage, a home for abandoned children and an animal reserve.

    It was an extraordinary experience and opened my eyes to worlds I’d had no notion of. After the placement finished I wandered off alone into Peru and Bolivia with no idea of what I would do or where I would go, and ended up buying my first guitar in La Paz.

    When I eventually arrived at St-Hilda’s College, Oxford I had firmly cemented my relationship with the guitar as a tool for songwriting. It wasn’t until later after graduation, when I moved to London, that I discovered the harp.

    A friend and luthier kindly lent me one of his instruments, which featured on my first album As the Crow Flies recorded under the moniker Forestbrook (after my first family home). That album is as underground today as it ever was. So it delighted me greatly when – after releasing my first solo album We Are the Wildlife a decade later – the press validated my work. Four star reviews from The Guardian, The Independent, Mojo and Uncut Magazine!? So giving up the day job hadn’t been such a bad idea.

    Bróna at St. Hilda’s.

    It had taken me a while to find my own voice. It wasn’t a sudden occurrence. I still recall Dad’s advice when I would sing a Dolly Parton song in her voice. “Careful with that vibrato! If you start that now, you’ll never be able to stop.”

    What matters most to me now is that I’m not imitating anyone. I am truly enjoying doing what I love, what feels right. But it’s not without great effort. There’s a wealth of technical knowledge, an endless sea of admin, grant applications, petitions to promoters, social media campaigns galore, and very many dull and tedious tasks that go with being a full time artist in your own right.

    As I heard Iarla Ó Lionáird recently concede during a lecture; “I think about giving up this job every single week!” And I know only too well why. If only we artists could simply enjoy doing our art.

    Link to The Woman in the Moon (The Album)

  • Musician of the Month: Niamh McKinney

    For a lot of my life I felt a fervent need to be doing something creative but I didn’t know what. Eventually I started to feel the unsated creative urge turn to intense frustration within me; a physical tension through my body, like important growth held back or suspended indefinitely. I pictured bunched vines in my arms, straining to be freed and climb. I knew I needed a creative outlet, but I didn’t know what it should be. I quashed these intense feelings, over and over, trying to reason them out of existence.

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNcw0ZkADKY

    A music-lover since I was tiny (as a small child I heard a lot of traditional Irish music; as a teen I loved The Cranberries, Alanis Morrissette, Pink Floyd, Kate Bush, Metallica, Sinead O’Connor, Leonard Cohen, Nirvana, a little Placebo, Smashing Pumpkins, Red Hot Chilli Peppers to name a few… then Joni Mitchell, Fairport Convention, Richard and Linda Thompson, Jefferson Airplane in my late teens/early twenties), I actually went through a long period in my early twenties of denying myself the pleasure of listening to my favourite songwriters.

    It had actually become painful for me: Listening to my favourite songs was never enough – I felt I should be writing songs. It was a nagging, constant voice chanting in my ear. However, for years I stifled that urge, I told myself people who don’t play an instrument can’t write songs. I kept telling myself I didn’t need to have a creative outlet, it wasn’t as though anyone else needed it to happen from me: there are plenty of songwriters out there! But it was a need, not merely a desire.

    A ferocious hunger was building in me and I felt utterly helpless in the face of it. I convinced myself I was unable to write a song. Isn’t it strange how boxed-in our ideas can be? How stifled and thwarted we can become because of them. I gave up on listening to music, it was too painful, and I was busy in life anyway, so there were a million distractions…

    https://soundcloud.com/niamhmckinney/the-price-new-mix?si=4cdfd3f26bef4171803e71ea2e647cf8&utm_source=clipboard&utm_medium=text&utm_campaign=social_sharing

    One day, however, my husband (a singer and guitarist) and I decided to record “Ain’t Misbehavin’” for a laugh on his Mac: He would put down the guitar and main vocal and I’d add harmonies. After we recorded the song – amazed by the possibilities that recording with the Mac offered – I asked my husband to show me how to layer tracks and then he left me alone for a while to play around with it.

    I grabbed a notebook of poetry (I’ve written since I was a small child) and started singing words into the mic. Entire songs came out of me, already fully formed. I was astounded and elated: I put my voice to the air as though freeing a bird long-trapped and the lines of words came out as songs, as though they’d been stored inside me just waiting to be sung. No thought or effort was needed. The question as to whether they were “good” or not didn’t actually occur to me at all. The creative frustration I had been feeling for years was finally being released.

    I was euphoric. I hardly left the bedroom for three days. I wrote at least twelve songs within those three days, each one a fully-formed melody and full set of lyrics: verses, choruses, bridges – everything flowing out effortlessly.

    I felt like I was wholly myself – truly – for the first time in my life. I didn’t need anything else to come from it. Having the songs written was enough. My soul had the avenue of expression it had been hankering for – making me absolutely desperate – for years. A month after my first bout of songwriting, the third song I wrote – “Down Near the Sea” – won a thousand euros in the Allingham Festival Songwriting competition. It was a very welcome validation.

     

    Despite the fact that my husband is a musician, it took a couple of years before he began writing accompaniments for my songs, all of which I wrote and recorded a capella – often recording them as I wrote them – with layered harmonies. He brought the songs to completion. He is highly intuitive and stays utterly true to the meanings and feelings of the songs. He also has an unbelievable ability to surprise me and craft unexpected accompaniments for certain of my songs. It is endlessly satisfying, having this creative relationship as well as our marriage now.

    The two of us derive enormous pleasure from it. He has said he loves being pushed creatively by certain of my songs to challenge himself and get the accompaniment to where he wants it.  I know next to nothing about music – keys, chords, etc – so the work of creating accompaniment is down to Steve. However, I sometimes write a line of melody for the guitar to play here and there, or request a certain sound or feel here, a certain atmosphere there, and we have developed an intuitive creative rapport between us.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney.

    I write alone and in dribs and drabs: a little ribbon of melody floating to me while I unpack the dishwasher; a snippet of a lyric coming to me while I’m out running. When I feel I have the song finished or near it, I sing it for Steve and he begins to write an accompaniment for it.

    Songwriting is a gift: A gift to a soul that endlessly craves to express itself, to express the way it experiences itself, and to channel pain and sorrow – as well as joy – in a way that no other art form allows.  I am blessed to be married to a gifted musician who creates the accompaniments, the structures for my songs to be held in and elevated upon.

    There is something ethereal and mysterious about how a melody visits you, or descends to you, and entices your voice to sing it. So deliciously mysterious; the compulsion to join voice to melody, lyric to line, in order to allow the soul a kind of freedom it can access in no other way. I have been singing since I was a baby.

    Melody comes to me at odd moments, or mundane moments. I might be thinking about something else entirely and suddenly notice I am humming a tune I quite enjoy and I’ll record it into my phone. A particular lyric will ‘ask’ for a particular series of notes; the notes come and lend themselves to the words, and suddenly the marriage of words to melody have completed the expression of the feeling; they encapsulate that extremely personal experience or reflection. When it happens I experience a unique high. I consider myself lucky, to have stumbled upon relief, release: A gift.

    Niamh and Stephen McKinney Bandcamp

  • Musician of the Month: Dan Trueman

    In my studio here, I have a clavichord, built by my parents in 1971, with a somewhat rococo and amusing backdrop painted by my mother (who otherwise has left us with a stunning body of mostly modernist artwork).

    I grew up with this painfully quiet clavichord, along with a gorgeous harpsichord (also built by my parents, and which I learned to tune by ear, a sign of things to come), countless recorders of various shapes and sizes (both parents were avid and accomplished players), lutes, oboes, guitars, baritone horns, and of course a piano (my older sister, annoyingly, plays pretty much all of these instruments with ease, though piano is her main instrument, so I grew up hearing that repertoire through her practice).

    Clavichord

    The basement of my childhood home on Long Island was filled with various tools, wood scraps, and other evidence of my parent’s instrument building habits (both were amateurs, by the way: during business hours, my father was a theoretical physicist, my mother a painter), and our evenings and weekends were filled with making music together with these instruments (ok, maybe that is a bit of revisionist history there, but we did make a lot of music together with these instruments as a family).

    I didn’t realize at the time that this wasn’t particularly normal. And one of the things that it marked me with is a love of musical instruments for their own sake, and a love of making music in an exploratory way with instruments at the heart of the process, performance relegated to a secondary concern. I performed, for sure, but it wasn’t the driving force behind the music making in my house, and we never performed together as a family.

    It also left me with a clear sense that the instruments themselves were things we made—not immutable, given objects—and thus were potential sites for exploration and revision.

    I loved my own instrument at the time—a somewhat tetchy violin made by the engineer Norman Pickering, himself a researcher of instrument design—though it took me a while to discover that the music I was learning with it—European Classical music—wasn’t, for the most part, what I really wanted to play (the Bach Unaccompanied Sonatas aside, really). Indeed, trying to discover the music that I do really want to play (and hear) has been the driving force behind my work ever since and has led to a number of explorations in musical instrument design itself.

    In my early 20’s, I flailed about trying to find ways to escape the confines of the Classical violin—its repertoire and technical training that leaves such a profound, embodied mark on anyone who goes deep with it—which led to predictable explorations of jazz improvisation and rock music, both of which also felt not quite right, though I learned a lot, and in particular ended up spending time with, of all things, the Flying-V 6-string fretted electric violin by Mark Wood, and an unfretted version made by my father.

    Hardanger fiddle

    Ultimately, I found the sound of the instrument unsatisfying—in spite of my best efforts, including exploring multiple other electric violins, pick-up systems, amplifiers, equalization and signal processing units, and so on—as well as the feel of the instrument—the solid-body electric violin is perversely rigid, and doesn’t seem to actually absorb any of our physical efforts.

    In the midst of these experiences, a composer friend of mine (Gavin Borchert) wrote a piece for me, for the electric violin, and he was inspired by the traditional music of Norway, in particular the Hardanger fiddle; my experience listening to the cassette tape he gave me—a recording of Anund Roheim playing music from Telemark in the 1950s—was one of those I will never forget; I remember where I was sitting, the time of day, the color of the sky, and so on, when I first heard the sounds of this magical, beguiling instrument and its mesmerizing music.

    There is so much I could say about the Hardanger fiddle, but I will focus on the sound and feel of it. Its sympathetic strings (extra strings that run underneath the fingerboard and ring along as you play) create a magical, personal, reverberant space around the player and, in contrast to the solid-body electric violin, it is so clearly responsive to our efforts, absorbing and extending them into this private space; it feels wonderful—physically—to play.

    Adapting my Classically-based technique to the instrument was far more challenging than I expected. The strings are slightly shorter, requiring ever so slightly different finger spacing, something that took months of slow practice to adapt to, especially given my own penchant for playing without vibrato, and for having the intervals ring as purely as possible.

    But even more than that, adapting my bowing technique to the instrument was particularly challenging. The Classical violin is designed to be as loud as possible, to project over an orchestra to the back of a concert hall, and it requires intense arm weight and energy to drive appropriately.

    In contrast, the Hardanger fiddle is designed to ring continuously, and it has a relatively flat bridge, so playing individual strings is difficult, and the strings are under noticeably less tension, so applying intense arm weight is counterproductive, suffocating the instrument rather than activating it. The instrument induces a more empathetic, gentle approach to playing, and I feel like I literally became a different person in transforming my physical technique to play it.

    Musical instruments have a way of bringing people together; indeed, in Norway one of the most common experiences with other fiddlers is simply sitting around, trying each others fiddles, visiting with a maker (many of whom are fiddlers themselves), and so on.

    Collaboration with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh

    The instrument itself is at the heart of the matter. The Hardanger fiddle brought me together with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh back in 2000; Caoimhín was working in my father’s physics lab, and I’m forever grateful to my father for recognizing that Caoimhín and I might like to meet!

    Another experience I’ll never forget: sitting with Caoimhín that summer (next to the harpsichord my parents built, by the way), playing tunes for each other, trying each other’s instruments, and so on. Subsequent similar sessions with Caoimhín in Dublin led to the discovery that I was using the wrong bow, one that itself was suffocating the Hardanger, and we now both use beautiful bows made by Michel Jamonneau; teaching my body to work with this new bow (actually, more of an old bow, based on Baroque designs) was a whole other transformative experience, far more challenging than I anticipated.

    Before I continue on with where my explorations of the Hardanger fiddle led over the subsequent decades, I will mention that during this time I was also exploring a whole range of other musical instrument design projects: my frustration with electric violin speakers led to collaborations with Perry Cook on the design of spherical speakers, which roughly emulate the way acoustic instruments fill rooms with sound; this itself led to the design of a radical new instrument, BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array), that is a spherical speaker outfitted with digital sensors of various sorts, so you actually bow the speaker itself, the sensors then mapping your physical actions to sound through the spherical speaker (sitting in the lap!) via a computer.

    BoSSA (the Bowed Sensor Speaker Array).

    This led to the establishment of the Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk), a kind of digital musical instrument design laboratory that remains in force today; which in turn led me to the development of bitKlavier, a kind of prepared digital piano that remains one of my primary projects today.

    The Princeton Laptop Orchestra (PLOrk).

    All that to say that musical instrument design has been at the heart of my artistic practice from the beginning.

    A New Instrument

    Back to the Hardanger fiddle… Some 15 years after my deep dive into the Hardanger fiddle began, I had the pleasure of collaborating with the Old Time fiddler Brittany Haas. Britt plays the 5-string fiddle; the extra string is lower, and she regularly tunes the instrument up in unusual, non-standard ways, which is also common with the Hardanger fiddle—all the open strings invite a drone-based approach to playing, with lots of double-stops (two notes at a time).

    One challenge though: the Hardanger fiddle, with its shorter strings, is usually tuned up quite a bit higher than the conventional fiddle, so when Britt and I would play, all of our open strings would be different from one another! In some cases, this was fodder for creative explorations, but other times was just frustrating and awkward. We did make an album together that I’m tremendously proud of—CrissCross—but the friction between the instrument designs led me to wonder whether there might be a new instrument out there, some kind of cross between the Hardanger fiddle and the 5-string fiddle.

    A pair of Hardanger d’Amores.

    And this is how the Hardanger d’Amore was born. In early 2010, I asked the Norwegian maker Salve Håkedal if he could imagine an instrument that has the ring and feel of the Hardanger fiddle, but is tuned down to where fiddles from the rest of the world are tuned, and also has an extra low string.

    Salve immediately started sending me sketches and ideas, and several months later I traveled to his workshop in southern Norway to pick up the very first Hardanger d’Amore (initially we called it a 5+5, because of its 5 strings on top, and the 5 sympathetic strings, but later Caoimhín dubbed it the Hardanger d’Amore, given its echoes of the Viola d’Amore).

    At the time, I was living in Dublin, and when I returned with the instrument, Caoimhín came by and gave it a try; he ordered #2 the very next day. Earlier this year, Caoimhín and I both got our second d’Amores, #35 and #36, a clear indication of how excited we both are about the instrument, not to mention the other 30+ fiddlers out there who now play one as well.

    Solo Album

    Last year, in the midst of quarantine, I made a solo album of original music for Hardanger d’Amore in my home studio. I generally prefer playing with other people, and am not so interested in playing solo concerts, but the lockdown made both impossible, so I was free to lay down some tracks that I certainly would not have had we not been so isolated by the pandemic.

    The album—Fifty Five—is something of a surprise to me, and it celebrates where I grew up, amongst the instruments that my parents built and played. It also celebrates the instrument itself, trying to reveal and discover some of the nooks and crannies of the soundworld the instrument embodies.

    I recorded these tunes up close, so the listener can hear something close to what I hear, right under my ear; I find it intense and personal but also, I confess, quite beautiful.  I’m also excited about my latest project with Caoimhín, our album The Fate of Bones, which he’s written about here so I will leave it at that.

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  • Musician of the Month: Sebastian Reynolds

    I have been passionate about music from a very young age. I felt an urge to play the saxophone thanks to the theme from The Pink Panther. Unfortunately, a four-year-old can’t hold let alone play the sax, but it turned out that the recorder has the same basic fingering as the sax. So I diligently turned up to lunchtime recorder lessons throughout primary school until I was rewarded with a sax on my twelfth birthday.

    I played the usual gamut of classics in the school orchestra and wind band but it was really the formative tinkering in the music rooms after hours with equally curious friends with a nascent interest in Brit Pop of the day that really creatively fired up.

    I was part of the generation who started their teenage interest with Oasis, Blur, Pulp, Suede et al, but then came into contact with the weirded side of things when Radiohead brought out Kid A. What an important record that turned out to be in terms of bringing whole new genres of music to a new generation of music lovers.

    I’ve played in bands since my teenage years, inspired by Jonny Greenwood and his weird noise making.

    I always felt like I had to be in a band, I never had a clear role model for the kind of artist that I am now, or found a trajectory for how to become a solo act, which I’ve only come to in recent years.

    For my solo work I’ve drawn on material that goes all the way back to when I was teenager. The opening track Amoniker from my EP The Universe Remembers is named after the band I was in when I was seventeen. It is based on samples from a cassette demo me and my band mate Nick made back in 2000.

    The title track of my EP ‘Nihilism is Pointless’ features samples from a cassette recording of our first Amoniker gig in the suburbs of Oxford:

    I had the idea for ‘HAL’s Lament’ – a reference HAL from Space Odyssey – in this form of a musical track when I was nineteen years old.

    And I also came up with the original piano motif that eventually formed the basis for my piece Holy Island when I was a teenager.

    There are other references, ideas and samples from my early years that I will continue to draw on. The facility to preserve sound over decades is a truly magical phenomena, and it’s so cool to have twenty years-worth of musical exploration and ideas to be able to draw on for inspiration.

    Conversely my recent EP Athletics features material that I made from scratch in the last few months. In general, I have such a large catalogue of material to draw from that I can leave tracks to one side and revisit them at a later date, which is a great luxury.

    There’s nothing more stressful than making something at the last minute and having to commit to it being finished and ready for mastering and release. The track ‘Hammering’ from Athletics EP was completed as I was sending off for mastering, though I think it turned out ok in the end!

    Talking of long-standing influences, since early childhood I was brought up by my dad with a passion for sports and athletics, particularly running.

    The Athletics EP is the first of my releases that has been directly inspired by this passion. I happened to see the great Ugandan runner Joshua Cheptegei break the 5000m world record at the Monaco Diamond League in August 2020. Sadly I was watching it on TV; if only I’d been there in person!

    Joshua Kiprui Cheptegei at the 2014 World Junior Championships in Athletics

    The excitement and surprise in the commentators’ voices was as remarkable as the run itself. No one had any idea that Joshua was going to give it a go that night, let alone pull it off.

    I channelled this energy into my track ‘Cheptegei’, and I’m very grateful that the commentators Steve Cram and Tim Hutchings gave me their permission to use the samples from their commentary.

    Other influences and inspirations for me have been on the sadder end of the spectrum. My mother lost her battle with cancer in 2016, and I sit typing this article at her old desk and chair. Her incredible being and courageous passing has inspired a great deal of my work, including this piece: ‘My Mother Was The Wind’.

    The other track I released this with, ’Heartbeat’, is dedicated to my son Noah, who was born asleep in July 2020. Heartbeat features the sound of Noah’s heartbeat recorded in the womb during a check-up. It is shared with love and solidarity to all who have suffered this heartbreak, and with thanks to the medical staff and our friends and family who gave us their love and strength through the grieving process.

    My recent single ’Crows’ is a celebration of my love for retro rave electronica, acts such as Chemical Brothers and Broadcast. It really lit a fire in me for the more upbeat end of electronica in my teenage years.

    Hazy memories of seeing the Chemical Brothers at Glastonbury fused with an element of live instrumentation inspired by the likes of Battles, who I caught relatively early on at Truck Festival. Those were the days!

    I used to perform with a couple of great electronic acts from Oxford where I’m from, shout out to Keyboard Choir and The Evenings. I’m getting misty-eyed!

    Aside from this string of solo EPs and singles, I’ve also worked on commissions for original scores for dance company par excellence Neon Dance. We worked together on Mahajanaka Dance Drama, an Anglo-Thai collab with Thai dancers and musicians.

    The show toured the UK and I released two EPs of material from the show. The track Mahajanaka seemed to really strike a chord with people, and the music video is made with footage that came out of our research trip to Thailand.

    I also worked on the stage show Puzzle Creature with Neon Dance:

    And have performed and collaborated with the German musicians Alex Stolze (violin) and Anne Müller (cello) as Solo Collective. We released two records together via Alex’s Nonostar Records, and have more in the pipeline!

    In terms of my next solo releases I have a bunch of amazing remixes and reworked tracks from the Athletics EP, and am planning to release my debut album Canary in 2023. Keep an eye on my website: www.sebastianreynolds.co.uk

    Athletics EP out now on Faith & Industry

    Feature Image of Sebastian Reynolds by Ed Nix.

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  • Musician of the Month: Giulia Gallina

    Music is a language and languages are musical. My life has always been about that: an exploration of these two elements and how they are deeply connected and influenced by one another: music and languages perpetually coexisting in balance. 

    I grew up in Milan, Italy, and as a child I remember constantly being exposed to classical music: my parents got me a piano and arranged a teacher when I was six; I was then sent to music school to learn violin and sang in the La Scala children’s choir.

    That went on until I realized that I preferred to play and sing my own compositions having become curious about other genres.

    I was always attracted by introspective and melancholic yet dreamy melodies, which reflects a part of my character. Although I can’t recall what came first in my life – the gloomy piano composers or a contemplative, silent nature.

    In contrast, another part of my musical formation was deeply influenced by electro, new wave and indie music, which turned me into a devotee of underground clubbing back in the Milanese period, and then Birmingham (!), and later on – when I moved to Lisbon I started to work as a DJ, which went on for quite a few years.

    DJ Cat Noir.

    In the meantime, I managed to find similarities between synchronizing different beats while spinning records at night, and simultaneously listening to one language and translating into another when working as an interpreter during the day; in a way it all made sense, except the lack of sleep.

    However, I felt like I had space for more. As soon as I arrived in Lisbon, I enrolled in the city Music Academy to take up the piano again. Soon afterwards I joined the band The Loafing Heroes to play concertina.

    With Barholomew Ryan of the Loafing Heroes.

    The idea of wandering and loafing in slowness in the fashion of French flâneurs always appealed to me, and I have remained a member of this morphing, dream-folk collective for the past seven years.. Along the way, I have added the autoharp, keyboard, vocals and percussion to the mixture

    I never imagined focusing on a single activity in life, as our society often suggests , or narrowing down my field of interests. At times I struggle when friends or family look askance at this way of being, but I try to listen to an inner voice, which is always whispering in my ear, not to surrender, and follow my instincts in calm or stormy weather, as the time we are given in life is too short to do otherwise.

    I believe human nature needs more sources of inspiration and these can come in many different forms.

    For example, without traveling far and or to different places outside the culture that I grew up in, there would hardly be any music in my life (or languages, for that matter).

    The simple act of moving from one place to another, getting out of our usual space and time conceptions, leaving aside our constructed identities and comfort zones for a while and experiencing alterity or otherness, makes us see reality in different ways and leaves us open to unexplored fields of imagination and art.

    We are often held back by our holding blindly on to assumptions about reality. In many cases, it is these uninspected assumptions which are the root cause of our living in a painful state of perpetual contraction, of fear.

    It is not only Indian music that inspired my spirit and techniques, but the experience of India itself (in the day-to-day living and travelling with its smells, sounds and images); it is not only traveling around Greece that influenced the way I compose but also embracing Greek poets through the ancient and modern Greek languages, recalling the myths and traditions of their soil, feeling a sense of wholeness and synthesis in the elements; then everything becomes undivided and starts revealing in an uncontaminated way, in the form of inspiration.

    That is how my recent project Storm Factory was born, which is a duo with the Portuguese musician Rui Maia.

    The idea was to develop a new aesthetic path from the fusion of my neoclassic and minimalist piano compositions with Rui’s experimental and ambient electronics.

    It is a dialogue between different universes, the search for a dreamy and cinematic soundscape where a sensory piano inspired by sea travels and ancient myths encounters a full set of industrial and unsettling sounds.

    Aesthetically reframed objects and materials come together as with completing a puzzle, drawn by the noises of cities, factories, people, water, abandoned houses and crushed leaves.

    Storm Factory. Image by Hugo Santos.

    Most of these piano compositions were born during the first lockdown, when I also started painting and longing for the places I still hadn’t been to.

    My CoronaCity, 2020.

    This yearning for places that I couldn’t travel to led me to come up with another project called Zephiro. It is a podcast that I decided to create, produce and release by myself.

    It is about travel literature and contains original music and sound effects, which I capture with special field recording equipment.

    In each episode I talk about a travel book that inspired me and that can motivate people to read and travel. The book selection is made according to the following criteria: alternative ways of traveling; spirit of adventure; inner transformation of the traveller; and getting out of their own comfort zone.

    The music component of the podcast is of great importance, as I composed ad hoc music for each episode which is inspired by the countries and characters appearing in the story. The sound design is specifically forged to accompany the travels to help create a unique listening experience.

    Zephiro. Design by Hugo Santos.

    In this period, I also dedicated a lot of time to meditation, to the understanding that all the activity of our minds is not who and what we think we are. It is tragic how we are taught since the beginning of our lives to identify with the activity of our minds, our thoughts and feelings, their related turmoil.

    It is important for me to get a sense of the space within which all this activity is taking place and recognize the silence in which all our inner sounds can arise.

    Fernando Pessoa’s said: ‘my language is my homeland.’ I feel the same about my mother tongue of Italian, and also about music. I bring these with me anywhere I go, like rivers flowing in an eternal, sacred space that mean I only very rarely feel lonely.

    Morocco. Image: Hugo Santos.

    Feature Image by Hugo Santos.

    Links to Projects

    The Loafing Heroes

    Zephiro

    Storm Factory

    https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4gtK5-YWwBE&feature=youtu.be