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
Martin Mackie is a singer and music producer from Belfast who has been living in Dublin for more than a decade. His latest single The Ballad of Christy Moore is a tribute, with a comical twist, to the Irish musical legend from Kildare. It is from Martin’s new album Temperance Songs, which will be released later this year. All of the songs on the album are about drinking and the peculiar relationship the Irish have with booze.
The songs are about my own experiences with alcohol. Not just me personally but my family and friends. Rollovers, lock-ins, early houses, hair of the dog, and the booze blues are just some of the subjects. But I’ve tried to add a bit of comedy to the misery.
The Ballad Of Christy Moore is folk tune, one of two on the album. The other is The Ballad of Brendan Behan, which I wrote with Craig Walker from The Power of Dreams. The Christy song is about me coming back after a weekend of madness at a music festival. I was hanging, as they say in Dublin. I had this weird dream or maybe even a hallucination that the ghost of Christy Moore was in my wardrobe, even though he’s very much alive. Christy’s a famous ex-boozer. So in the song he jumps out and starts lecturing me on the evils of excess.
I was a bit worried what Christy would think of the song because there’s a line in it that describes him as being all ‘sweaty and hairy’. So I sent it to him. I was absolutely delighted when he sent me back a lovely postcard that said: “Dear Martin, Sweaty and Hair! Ride on. Christy.” And he drew a little guitar beside it. I’ve framed that.
William Hogarth – A Rake’s Progress – Tavern Scene
I got the whole idea for Temperance Songs from a series of paintings by the artist William Hogarth. The Rake’s Progress is a set of eight paintings showing the rise and fall of young man who ends up in the Bedlam asylum because of his partying lifestyle. I was gonna write a song for each painting but I found out the composer Igor Stravinsky had beaten me to that idea. You can’t compete with him so I had to change things. Instead I drew from my own experience.
The track ‘Drunk For Fifteen Years’ features vocals by Waterford singer Katie Kim, who is another friend. That song is about a guy in hospital after a mammoth drinking session. Again, there are ghosts and spirits in the lyrics; that seems to be a recurring theme. I think there’s a lot of mystery to booze, the psychological effect it has on you when you drink and the downer you can get if you overdo it. Nobody in Ireland really talks about this stuff, beyond platitudes and clichés, so I thought it would be nice explore it in an album.
There’s other songs such as a Lock-in for The Damned about a famous Dublin venue where people end up leaving, completely twisted, when it’s daylight. That’s normal behaviour in the music world
The first single off Temperance Songs was released before the pandemic. It is called Magic Potion and it features a host of well-known musicians. Kate Ellis, who is the musical director of the Crash Ensemble plays cello, Conor O’Brien, from Villagers, plays bass guitar, Eleanor Myler, from the shoegaze band Percolator plays the drums with Mackie on guitar and vocals.
The video was made by long-time friend and collaborator Laura Sheeran.
It’s an incredibly well shot video. Laura is such a talent in everything she does and she does a lot of things. For the video she does what the song tries to do…find beauty in the misery. We’ve been pals for years and she sings backing vocals along with Niamh Lowe on another one of the tracks on the album called The Apple.
In Magic Potion, there’s a line “we’re the ones who wish good health with a poison chalice.” It’s weird the way we all say ‘slainte’ or ‘good health’ when this thing is classified as poison. I’m not an anti-booze crusader at all. But nobody really talks about the downsides of it, the ‘booze blues,’ or ‘the fear’ — the negative aspects.
I was in Conor O’Brien’s house, from Villagers, and got chatting about the song. I recorded a demo with Ellie from Percolator and sent him it. This fantastic bassline came back in a style I would never have thought of in a million years. Kate from Crash Ensemble got involved and I went to Laura Sheeran’s house and recorded cello in her living room.
So I went into the studio with Ellie’s drums, Conor’s bass, Kate’s cello and my vocals and guitar — and it sounded really good. Laura then shot the video for me.
While Magic Potion is slow and menacing,, A Lock-in for the Damned whizzes along with the whimsical feel of a 1980s indie track in the vein of Orange Juice or Josef K and the tension between the jocular music and the slowly unfolding madness of the storyline was deliberate.
Martin sings in the chorus, ‘I’d like to flee the madness but the door and me are locked’ — and most people in Ireland have found themselves in similar situations.
I suppose A Lock-in for The Damned represents the party before the disaster and the following day of hell. It’s about me and my friends who would often have lock-ins at various pubs. You’re there all night. It’s just a free-for-all, and the spirits and the black pints flow and you’re leaving when it’s daylight.
There’s something very, very odd when you’re walking along the street in the morning and you’re half-pished and there’s people jogging past you, or going to work, and living their everyday life. I thought it was something that’s not written about really.
Alcohol can be a wonderful drug if used correctly, and we all enjoy times together and it’s good for relaxing, but it’s only good if you’re in a good space. But it never works, for me anyway, if you’re trying to escape your troubles or you’re feeling a bit down.
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 bandThe Loafing Heroes to play concertina.
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.
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.
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.
Do you know the feeling of wanting to discover secrets that aren’t being spoken aloud?
For a while I thought it was an esoteric way of preserving knowledge. I imagined there were savants to seek out, to turn to.
And in search of traces, I became passionate about chasing and searching for the threads of various human cultures, intertwined for thousands of years, starting from the perspective of Sicily, an island in the middle of the Mediterranean.
At a certain point I began to realize that the secrets were no longer alive: the people were gone, without leaving a cultural legacy behind.
Impossible, you will say. Everyone leaves an enduring oral imprint on the people around them. And yet, through passages less emphatic than the burning of books, or the eradication of cultural witnesses, a culture may be overwhelmed and deleted by a dominant culture, leading to the progressive decay and then complete disappearance of a cultural legacy over a few generations.
Cultural Imperialism
We are the result of five thousand years of cultural imperialism, which has slowly led to the affirmation of the strongest and most violent group, which now presents itself as an international, global monoculture that has drastically overwhelmed all others. It is the culture of today’s contemporary globalized world: capitalist, patriarchal, monotheistic and consumerist, in which a few cultural differences found at various latitudes appear almost as commercial nuances – variations on stimulating consumption.
As soon as I realized that I was living in an era directed by a total cultural monopoly, I began frenziedly passing on, divulging, recomposing and reviving those shreds of a subaltern culture that I could find; whether they were dying, or perhaps already immortalized by a lone enthusiast, annotated and then recorded over the past centuries; although often in forms not suitable for preserving the enduring ferments in the material of oral tradition.
I sought the secrets “between the lines” of verses or stories: after all, we know that this way has always been used to preserve and pass on things: concealing them in a joke, a rhyme, a riddle, a bell, or a proto-memory.
I searched inside song traditions, oral stories, and in the repertoire of oral tradition, which they have not been able to completely eradicate from memory: precisely the songs of oral tradition which has the potential to preserve and pass on secrets about the meaning of life, the most important baggage that generations have the burden to pass on – at all costs and through all possible stratagems – in case of censorship and oppression.
Women’s Songs in the Sicilian Tradition
In the last few years I have been primarily interested in Women’s Song in the Sicilian tradition, which constitutes an even more fragile niche in the midst of the general fragility of the heritage of tradition, since it suffers in addition from the perpetual minority suffered by the patriarchal cultures that have followed one another since the third millennium B.C..
It is a repertoire scarcely paid attention to, liminal to other stronger and more manifest repertoires, more excavated and documented; and in any case predominantly investigated from a male perspective; from a point of view that is still and always hegemonic, in terms of the gender question.
This is the most fertile repertoire for those who, like me, are in search of handed-down secrets: women represent a particular segment of social reality, in which the needs of the private and family sphere interpenetrate uniquely with the needs of the public, socio-economic sphere; women have the task of ensuring the survival and growth of the social actors of the future, the children, and women, have the task of turning the economic wheel of the family micro-society. Always.
Lullabies
The musical repertoire of women is often a mixture of different genres that refer both to the classic cycle of life – including lullabies, engagement, wedding songs and funeral laments – and to the sphere of work, as well as to the religious sphere, in a diversified way according to the religion of reference.
Often the added value that we find in the fragments of female repertoire is that there is a greater purity and resistance to the assimilation of the hegemonic cultures, alongside a tendency towards fusion.
Having been maintained and handed down in an intimate and private setting, and almost always in the absence of musical instruments, they have not been subject to admixture and transformation to adapt to changing tastes and fashions, resulting in the loss of content and precision of message.
In the repertoire of female gender, the first place – cultural universal – is entrusted to the chapter of maternity. That is to the lullabies and dirges that women in every part of the world sing to their children to quieten them and accompany them in their sleep.
The lullaby is the song of intimacy and privacy, it remains contextualized to the intimacy of the mother-daughter relationship.
I am convinced that the valorization – the patrimonialisation of this enormous cultural baggage, immaterial heritage of the human race – restores strength, health and richness to the woman, and to her social role. It is a wide and shared documentation of this infinite repertoire, allowing for the patrimonialisation of a real hidden and almost unused treasure.
My two latest albums from 2019: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo and of 2020: Viva Santa Liberata. Sicilian Women Folksongs, are dedicated to the traditional female repertoire. They are the culmination of many years of research – an audio production project investigating, witnessing, and passing on this repertoire.
The path of research on lullabies has been going on for twenty years. It includes field research, the testimonies of women in the first person through intercultural workshops, archival research, and even authorship in some cases.
Above all it has come about in meetings, not only with women but also often with sensitive men who have a strong sense of the magical power of the lullaby.
Collaborators
The opportunity to record an album of lullabies presented itself in 2018. Thankfully, the idea received a warm welcome from the singer friends to whom I proposed a collaboration, under my artistic direction (Simona Di Gregorio, Costanza Paternò, Clara Salvo, the very young Rawen Laid).
Each had the task of testifying some traditional lullabies, not only Sicilian but looking to a wider Mediterranean culture for inspiration, with freedom of choice in the type of processing and repurposing; the disc: Dormi, a matri. Ninne nel Mediterraneo (2019) represents one more instrument with which to carry out the project.
VIVA SANTA LIBERATA is a record that was created as a tribute to women’s singing, in particular narrative singing, another branch of the female repertoire that has fallen into almost total disuse.
The songs of mothers and daughters, grandmothers and mothers-in-law, sisters and aunts, cummari, majare and soothsayers, midwives and nannies, complainers, healers; the song of girls and ‘teachers of water.’
The title was born from a provocative play on words in relation to the iconography of the feminine in Christian cultures, proposing a synthesis of the dualism between virginal sacrifice and chastity on the one hand, and self-determination and sexual freedom on the other.
Santa Liberata
Santa Liberata claims her atavistic freedom, starting from sexual freedom, the source of all her other powers connected to life and its balance, in the cyclical nature of time, and her source is the fountain of Living Water.
Santa Liberata (in Sicilian “Libbirata”) is the character that continues to guide my work in the last two years. She presents herself in appearance as the Catholic saints, and requires the usual celebrations reserved for the patron saints, such as Santa Rosalia in Palermo and Santa Agata in Catania, that is, required at the annual preparation of a Fistinu, in which her qualities and merits are magnified and her precepts divulged.
PART II – A World Music Festival in Sicily
But the Fistinu is not only this, it is an enterprise involving dozens of artists, workers and associations that have joined my adventurous proposal to build an event around the music, which puts at the centre the idea of a healthier community: a mixed community in which identities and traditions intersect, intertwine and develop; a concrete community that integrates with the natural world; that welcomes it in a symbiotic and non-competitive way, rebuilding the good traditional ecological practices.
It is the heritage of our ancestors; a community of individuals aware of their right to well-being, to care for themselves according to their own free choice, as symbolized by the medicinal hemp, symbol and ornament of Santa Libbirata; an idea of liberation of conscience that starts from the liberation of women, and for this Santa Libbirata.
The Fistinu is an event in which people can find the beneficial dimmension of the participatory FESTIVAL, using the traditional techniques of music, song and dance.
The feast is an occasion in which people dance together, as a communal rite of reintegration of well-being ‘individual through the collective and collective through the individual.’
The popular or folk music has among its functions to bring together the community in a particular occasion, merging together in an experience of total participation, physical, mental and emotional, with the support of rhythm and song; each tradition retains its key to open the doors of participation through dance and song, a ritual and archaic dimension that helps to recreate social harmony and community well-being.
We endeavoured to recreate a tradition of FESTIVAL in Sicily, which in addition to supporting itself through the indigenous cultural traditions, such as the contradanza or the ballittu, inevitably recreates itself by opening and dialoguing with other musical traditions, the cultures that coexist in Sicily today, which can point a magnifying glass on the processes of migration and cultural metissage.
Cultural Crossroads
Looking at the past, centuries of real experience of cultural cross-fertilization between different and distant traditions – including Arabs, Vikings, Greeks, French, Turks and Americans – are the basis on which Sicily’s own musical tradition, the most archaic, has been constituted.
Looking at the present, Sicily is the junction and crossroads of the great migrations of the third millennium, on its territory different experiences and cultural languages continue to meet, dialogue and merge.
Since the third millennium A.D. began we have witnessed the transformation of the whole world. There are no longer borders for information, culture, fashions (unfortunately still too many borders for the dignity of human beings on the move): inevitably the transformation leads to global métissage.
The culture of global métissage is like a river in which everything is mixed; if the course is too wide, values sink and rot at the bottom, the surface becomes one sterile insignificant reality, enslaved to the market and the economic system; but if the course is alive, the identity of our ancestors does not fade in the midst of everything, but is enlivened alongside the others – roots that intertwine and strengthen each other.
Then the métissage becomes our strength, the new strength of the individual of the future.
SI LU CHIù FORTI A’SSIRI SCANNATU
LU CHIù DIBULIDDU E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
SI LA PETRA FERMA A’SSIRI MARTIDDATA
COMU ACQUA CHI CURRI E VOGGHIU ESSIRI
C’ARRIFRISCANNU SCURRI E UNN’è DI NUDDU
L’ACQUA CURRI SUPRA LA MUNTAGNA
SCURRI LENTA MA PASSANNU CANCIA
CANCIA IDDA E CANCIA LA MUNTAGNA
LENTAMENTI L’ACQUA LA TRASFORMA
The music of cultural identity, of the roots, the language and the words of our ancestors, contain within themselves a permanent force. This is like water that flows and slowly manages to shape even the rock, which can allow us women and men of today to face the contemporary world with love, to bring our positive contribution to the creation of the society that is currently getting out of hand.
Micro Identity
That’s why I want to continue to sing in Sicilian, and not only in Sicily, in Italy, and in the whole world. The micro-identity doesn’t close, doesn’t stop and doesn’t die out, but can be offered to the world without fear, allowing us to open up and confront each other, bringing knowledge, esteem and enrichment that strengthens all our resolve.
And I want to meet and get to know closely your stories in your dialects and your songs and dances, to be able to see the strength of the recognition of the message: Acqua di stu chiaru fonti, that secret that has been handed down to us from the past of generations by our Ave.
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BIDDIZZI E D’ACQUA CHIARA
CA CU CI BIVI CI LASSA LA MENTI
UNDI CAMINI TU L’ARIA SCARA
PERNI E DOMANTI SU LI TO SBANNENTI
DI TUTTI LI FUNTANI SI CHIù RARA
E SUNNU L’ACQUI TOI LI CHIù LUCENTI
PRI TIA LA TIRRA STISSA SI PRIPARA
LARGA LU MARI CISSANU LI VENTI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI ARANCI
NA BEDDA COMU A VUI NUN SI PO PINCIRI
FUNTANA DI BILLIZZI ED ACQUI D’ANCILI
CUI PASSA DI STA STRATA LU FA MPINCIRI
TU SI FUNTANA DI TUTTI BILLIZZI
NTRA LU TO STICCHIU C’E LA MIDICINA
QUANTU MALATI C’è TANTU NNI SANA
C’A LI MALATI LIVATI LA SITI
A CHIDDI MORTI LI RISUSCITATI
CU VIVI ACQUA DI STU CHIARU FONTI
S’APRI LU CIELU E CALANU LI SANTI
Speaking to the Ancestors
But from what past are the ancestors speaking to us? Or rather, how far back is this past from which these rhymes emerge? The rhymes speak of a feminine entity superior to the human dimension, whom one addresses face to face, like a mother or a companion, but whose praises are sung in music, as to a Goddess. It is an emergence of the prehistoric Mediterranean Culture of Mothers.
Digging into history, I wondered when it happened, and how such an unbalanced way of life took over; I was lucky enough to discover the work of prehistoric archaeology by Marija Gimbutas, who reinterpreted prehistory, in particular the time period between 3000 and 2000 BC.
This was before a prolonged period of invasion, when a different culture was widespread throughout the Mediterranean and Europe, up to Ireland. From the archaeological data, she concluded this was non-hierarchical, mutualistic, and based on the balance with the natural elements, in which women kept the most valuable skills related to survival, and were responsible for the welfare of the community.
Wayne Dyer called this Gilanic culture, joining equally the Greek roots: -gyn feminine and -an masculine with the unifying letter lambda.
Extra-Europeans
There was a time when those who now pretend to be the original indigenous citizens of Europe were only the new comers, the ‘Extra-Europeans’ of the past. They established their presence by means of wars and violence, trying to destroy or to exploit for their own aims the civilisation they found. They have been trying since then to impose their own single set of truths, values, gods. Now we can say that they failed in doing so at least for two basic reasons: first, we are still here to prove the existence of that earlier civilization, the goddess civilization, because they cut and burnt the trees but didn’t eradicate their/our roots; secondly, what has been achieved through violence and a monocentric male paradigm of dominance is a society based on malaise, destruction and death without regeneration and growth. Now we need a new science, a new politics and a new history, that is no more just his–story.
What have been called disdainfully ‘matriarchal studies’ indicate that egalitarian forms of social structures have existed in the past and are still in existence today in some parts of the world. In ‘matriarchies’ women are at the centre of culture without ruling over other members of society: their aim is not to have power over other people and over the natural world, but to have the power to nurture cultural life based on mutual respect.
…
Our task, therefore, is to transform the hope originating from all these discoveries about our Archaic Past into bursting energy to Realize now, as Mary Daly calls it, our Archaic Future.
Luciana Percovich, Barcelona, 2003.
So I found the tangle of the skein, and what’s more, I found myself with the thread in my hand. When a woman finds herself with a thread in her hand, the archaic instinct is to start weaving.
And from time immemorial, you have to involve others to weave together, if the fabric is endlessly wide.
Weaving then, it is in that time that songs are born: it is there that the story is always made goddess.
This is what Percovich means by Her-story. But let’s go in order.
Tangle of the Skein
The tangle of the skein is in this nebulous prehistory, out of which for decades now has emerged a new truthful narrative that speaks of a better world, or at least another possible one, through the archaeological evidence of a culture that refers to and strongly overlaps with the Utopia of the twentieth century, a better world, Huxley’s Island.
It opens a glimmer of hope: they almost convinced us that we are losers, utopians for an equalitarian and mutualistic world, they corroded our confidence in the ideal, and instead we have the archaeological evidence of the Neolithic, up to the Minoan culture in Crete, as witnesses of a better world.
And we know that this culture that was its bearer has been overwhelmed and prevaricated by an invading culture, which continues to prevail.
Once we have assumed this fact, the rest is all downhill, we simply need to reinterpret all that we known, and all that we will still learn with a new key, free from the intent of the dominant culture to make us slaves and oppressed, forgetting our identity. We haven’t been taught and told where we really came from, now we have to sew up the whole thread of history, to regain strength and courage, and self-confidence, and build our better world. Our archaic-future.
The Culture of the Mothers
The thread, I was saying, I found it in my hand. Digging into the archaeology of Sicilian songs, we can find these poetic fragments clearly ascribable to the spirituality of this culture of the Mothers, gilanic, and connected to the cult of Water and Waters: they are the retropapiri of our spiritual and ritual repertoire!
They can be a nucleus around which to sew up the fragments of memories of songs that have managed to reach us from this archaic culture, and by recomposing a fabric, we contribute to the re-emergence of a cultural identity in which we can feel at ease and heartened by our true roots.
Sicily is like a cauldron, the seething cauldron in which the cultural interactions between the migrant populations of history and the wandering of the merchants in the Mediterranean have stratified: among the sediments there are traces of cultural persistence of an ancient, prehistoric culture that unites us and reflects us: the culture of the Mothers.
It is the land of the golden apples, perhaps here rests hidden the Fata Morgana. If she is resting here, she is resting behind a magic mirror, and Circe is singing to call back from sleep all the sirens of the sea and invite them to a feast.
Women, says the song, let’s take back our customs, the feast must be done at least once a year, the feast where we can sing and dance and meet to tell our stories and our songs. In order not to disappear, to prevent our culture from dying out.
It is for this reason that from Sicily SANTA LIBERATA SENDS AN APPEAL.
From Sicily to all the islands, both territorial and cultural: sisters we are, capitals of cultural persistence!
In us is the germ of resistance, if after so many millennia we can still resist with a memory of the stories, voices and songs of our ancestors, who handed down their island culture.
We bring together in a project a path of meetings of songs and sharing, a project of permanent chorus of the archaic feminine, we constitute an OPIRA OF PUPE.
Singers and performers, bearers of traditions, passionate, willing weavers, Santa Liberata is building the road, from Rome to Sicily. Spring 2022.
Sometime in early 2022, in the middle of the fourth or fortieth wave of the corona virus, I got a message from my old friend, Stefano Schiavocampo. He told me that he was editing for a magazine in Dublin and he’d like me to contribute.
“Me?” I thought, “What would anyone need to hear from me?” In finishing this abstract essay now, that thought still hasn’t changed much.
To be honest I basically just wrote it for him. I hadn’t seen Stefano in over five years. In my memory he’ll always be on fire in the eyes and still at heart. The eternal street musician, at home in the overgrowth of roads less traveled and Tuscan villas. The tarred fingers rolling Belgian anarchist squat cigarettes. The boules champion of mid-evil French castles with a perennial beer frothed mustache grin forever fresh from an Irish dive.
Though the thought of him is once again on my mind, I still don’t know where he and his family are today. Let’s say Dublin for lack of a better guess. I like to put him there, so I can dream myself back to that place. That rough little city of rain and song. The idea of an audience has become too abstract to imagine over the last two years of separation, so I write these words less to the faceless you and more for my old friend Stefano and my city of maybes; Dublin.
Before the Storm
I’m going to assume that you don’t know me. There are pretty few justifiable reasons why you would unless you were in south-eastern Florida in the late 1980’s. If so, then do you remember that hospital by the beach where it was forever womb warm? Where it’d get so hot it’d cook up thunder every afternoon like the one I was born on before the storm. If you weren’t there, then do you remember being out on that pier while I was making my first memory looking up at a spaceship drawing a cloud into the sky when the wind threw my hat into the waves and I was caught right before jumping in by my mom. Remember that skateboarding Mickey Mouse hat? It was great, right?
If you were there, then you obviously can’t forget dad’s accident and mom’s cancer. The Damocles Sword and an uprooting from coast to corn fields. Canned laughter on TV. Being a big brother. Fitting in and testing boundaries. Rejection at a grade-school dance. Starting a band in your basement. Remember those Nirvana covers and a new name every week (Sideburns Magoo, Brothers from Different Mothers, etc…)? Power chords turned to fingerpicking.
Time went marching and the coddled underwing turned to an opening curtain on the other side of the world. Graduating from structure to be reborn and blinded drunk talking Marx smoking through every bar and backstage back and forth between Berlin and Vienna, with something to prove and not much to do it with.
You might have been there and might remember more than me. If you weren’t, then there are songs I forget that we can use to remember.
So, so many songs. Used to show you my world. Used to make me what I wanted to be. Used to understand what I was feeling. To put words to the wordless. Then sing and sing and sing again till hoarse. Surrendering nightly to and follow behind powerlessly contorting to the shape of a stage-light shadow of a past me or a mimicked subconscious idol.
Remember when all the hope of youth ran out of greener grass to graze on? Maybe it happened to you too. Waking up in a small room of a shared apartment wondering “why here and how forward?”
Stubbornly stagnated sticking to a dream no longer dreamt and fattened by vices lazing low below the horizon of what dreams may come. Onward the same. Onward the same. Feet in a world changing and a skull shat full by boomers. Heavy-headed limbo walking closer and closer to the ground. Raging inside rolling and worming across a world of drying sidewalks. The friction of blue-eyed ambitions rubbing up against obstacles of age.
Sparking and humming the subtle melodies sap slowly out of fall trees. We have felt the fretboard for a resolving chord. Not knowing the notes we play, but knowing only if they sound right. Those human feelings passing from you to something beyond. Slowly they launch like drops of sweat evaporating up into clouds to rain on far off fields. The songs faintly rumble in the internal distant thunder of night. The sound of little universes being born. A world of meaning in a moment.
Though I have assumed that you don’t know me and I not you, a storm is born from all but itself and a creation never comes alone. Creation is an act of sharing. To sense is to share. To share yourself. To share in someone else. To give and receive simultaneously. To connect. In spite of the distance between us now. In spite of this world where we are all apart. To bridge the gaps in the voids inside of us and between us with an honest act of creation is one of the few real beauties we have. Where we are a part of each other. To remember we are one. I’m trying to remember. Do you? Remind me.
— Ian Fisher is a songwriter, performer, and recording artist raised in Missouri, USA, and living between Germany and Austria. Rolling Stone magazine describes his music as “half Americana and half Abbey Road-worthy pop”. He has written nearly two thousand songs while touring Europe, the USA, and Africa. You can listen to his most recent album, “American Standards”, on his website (www.ianfishersongs.com/music) or on any streaming site and you can support his music by joining him at www.fanklub.com/ianfishersongs. Fisher is currently working in Sicily on a new collection of intimate songs for an album to be released this November.
The process of discovering sounds has always been an aspect of music I’ve been connected to, even when I wasn’t aware of its potential and possibilities. During childhood and adolescence, I experimented with instruments, recorded and improvised. It was a somewhat chaotic, intuitive process without pretensions.
In my early teens my parents offered me a classical guitar and a few weeks later a friend lent me an electric one. With these instruments, my conscious interest in music really began. I mostly listened to heavy metal bands.
I began subscribing to guitar magazines, mainly from Germany and the United States, with exercises by Steve Vai and Joe Satriani, and spent hours listening to the solos of Metallica and other bands I liked.
When I went to university to study civil engineering in Porto, Portugal, in addition to academic studies, I attended to the Porto Jazz School (electric guitar) and later the Conservatory of Music of Porto (Portuguese guitar – the instrument I play currently).
I completed the civil engineering course and worked for seven years in this sector. During this period, I was always connected to music, but the time came when I decided to reduce my engineering activity and dedicate myself fully to music.
I wanted to deepen my knowledge in composition. So I moved from Porto to Lisbon to study composition at the Escola Superior de Música de Lisboa. During this time, I studied contemporary music during the day, and played Portuguese guitar in Fado houses at night. The musical scope was very wide, as these two musical universes have many differences. Sometimes I had difficulty dealing with it but on the other hand it was also an effective way of not being absorbed in the same music all the time.
After that I studied for a Master in composition in Switzerland with Isabel Mundry at the Zurich University of Arts, with a scholarship from the Fondation Nicati-de Luze, and in Germany with Stefan Prins and Mark André at the Hochschule für Musik Carl Maria von Weber Dresden.
I also had private classes and masterclasses with composers Toshio Hosokawa, Chaya Czernowin, Hans Tutschku, Dieter Ammann, Franck Bedrossian, Zigmunt Krauze, Åke Parmerud, Carola Bauckholt, Klaus Lang, Peter Ablinger, among others.
During my studies in composition, I investigated different forms of musical creation, their relationship with other arts, and had my works performed. It was a new and exciting world.
Currently, I’m working on contemporary music daily and methodically, which implies research, listening, reading and trans-disciplinarity. I’m based in Zurich (Switzerland) and Porto (Portugal), and travelling regularly around Europe to collaborate with musicians, ensembles, fine and visual artists performing and recording my works. I’m also researching on surrounding sounds: from figuration to deformation.
“Voices and Landscapes” is an album that includes five works, composed for different instrumentations, in which the voice is the common element, present in all the pieces.
The central theme of this album is the landscape, which led me to research diversified sounds ranging from nature to urban places, totally shaped by human action. I was also influenced by poems by Antero de Quental and Fernando Pessoa.
The work was supported by Ministry of Culture of Portugal, DGArtes, SPAutores and Antena 2 (Portuguese classical radio).
Programme Notes
‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’
for soprano, saxophone, accordion, viola and violoncello
performed by Síntese GMC
‘Some Lines Mixing a Color’ is a work that started from a photograph taken by the composer during a rigorous winter day, where the dense fog covered the shapes of nature. This piece addresses the influence of the invisible in relation to the human perception of the image. By mediating the image with the sound, dense lines and random structures were created, that coexist in the same space with fine lines and organized sound material, leading perception and memory to different places, in a dialogue of counterpoint, gestures, intuition and events, which shape time and form.
for flute, clarinet, percussion, harp, piano, mezzo-soprano, violin, viola and violoncello
Performed by Grupo de Música Contemporânea de Lisboa
Conducted by Pedro Neves
Based on the poem ‘Paisagens, Quero-as Comigo’ by Fernando Pessoa, this is a work composed for an ensemble of nine musicians. “Landscapes, I want them with me / Landscapes, pictures that are… / Waving wheat laurel, / Sun beacons that I follow, / Bad sky, reeds, solitude… / Some by the hand of God, / Others by the hands of fairies, / Others by chance of mine, / Others by memories given… / Landscapes… Memories, / Because even what you see / With first impressions / At some point was what it is, / In the cycle of sensations. / Landscapes… Anyway, the content / Of what is here is the street / Where the good sun of torpor / That insinuates in my soul / I don’t see anything better.” by Fernando Pessoa.
‘Sleeping Landscapes’ is a piece for choir inspired by excerpts from poems by Bernardo Soares, taken from Livro do Desassossego (The Book of Disquiet). It was composed in Tronco, a small village in the municipality of Chaves (Portugal), where contact with the natural landscape is permanent and, at times, because it feels so original, it seems to be asleep.
I came from prodigious lands, from landscapes more beautiful than life itself, but I never spoke of those lands, except to myself, and told no one of the landscapes glimpsed in dreams. … I see my dreamed landscapes as clearly as I see the real ones. When I lean over to look into my dreams, I am leaning over something real. When I see life passing, I am also dreaming something. Bernardo Soares.
Based on the poem ‘Oceano Nox’ by Antero de Quental, this is a work composed for a chamber group that includes soprano, bass flute, cello and piano, where gestures, timbre, the phenomenon of object/event and transformation of sound through resonance are the criteria that mediate the poem and the sound. “Beside the sea, which hoarsely sent its great / The tragic voice to landward, while the wind / It passed like the flight of a thought / Which seeks and hesitates, restless and intermittent, / Beside the sea I sate disconsolate, / Scanning the sullen sky with mist-clouds lined, / And, in my revery, questioned the lament / That rose from things, vaguely… / What restless whim disquiets you, / O forces obscure, and beings that begin to be? / What thought is that which moves you in your courses? / But from the vast horizon, where doth hide / Forever the Unconscious, comes to me / A roar, a distant plaint, and naught beside…” by Antero de Quental.
Performed by Hugo Vasco Reis and Choir of Native Speakers
‘Polyphonic Mass’ is a work of field recordings that aims to investigate and understand the properties of common sounds we hear in everyday life, which, in principle, are neglected, as they do not assume a major importance in our hearing. These field recordings are also an opportunity to create a distancing from traditional patterns, looking for a different plan to work the sound and make the collected material detach from a image or situation in particular, joining sounds that are apparently unrelated. The perception of neglected sounds creates a status quo phenomenon, as a criterion for the creation of this work, which goes from figuration to sound deformation. Thus, elements of a present time and a place, or several places, are combined, which convey the fragility of everyday situations, their ritualization, polyphony, impulse, density and prosody as elements of musical discourse.
“You can play! Just take it easy, play slow. Play for a few minutes and then give it a break… there’s no panic!”
I was recently asked by one of my composing mentors to think about and summarise what I’ve done as a musician and composer so far.
So I sat down and tried to recollect my memories of how it all began, and how indeed I have managed to be lucky enough to adopt one of my biggest passions as a full-time profession for the past several years!
As I began to travel back in time, re- encountering a happy child’s uninhibited explorations of the world of sound, long afternoons and evenings spent at the local music school and orchestras, my first ventures into playing more groove-based music; I soon reached a curious turning point that stirred up major reflection. I revisited a period in my life that, at the time, felt excrutiantingly painful, though ultimately helped me to foster a healthy and much deeper relationship with music.
Music School and Hurting Hands
My early musical life majorly evolved around playing classical music: I took lessons on various instruments at the local music school and was part of various ensembles and choirs as well as local and international orchestras.
Truth be told, I don’t think I was ever that taken by the actual music we played. At home I would listen to bands like the Beatles, Nirvana, the Spice Girls, Tic Tac Toe, Broadlahn, or Sandy Lopicic Orchestar. However, I always loved the feeling of playing and singing with other people, to be part of the community.
I had wonderful music teachers and I think that, for the most part, they did not push me too much beyond standard expectations to practice. Rather, they tried to motivate me by conveying their passion for the music we were studying. When I started to experience trouble with my hands, there was one or other teacher who did not know how to steer me in the right direction of how to proceed with my daily practice. Having said that, the experience of chronic pain is a complex issue and beyond full comprehension of most teachers, musicians – and in fact doctors – that I have met so far. I am convinced that everybody always had my best interest at heart.
It was at the age of around seventeen that I developed repetitive strain in both of my hands; with a ganglion cyst developing in my right wrist as a consequence. Sometimes it hurt so bad that I struggled to brush my teeth. It disabled me so severely that for years and years I was barely able to play for more than ten minutes in one go.
I wrote my Leaving Cert exams on a laptop, as I was unable to write by hand. I had to stop taking lessons, cancel concerts, and burst out into tears regularly at folk sessions where all my friends were jamming and I could simply not join anymore. For one or two years I had to stop playing altogether and I was warned that the ganglion cyst could seize up and make it impossible for me to move my wrist anymore.
I went to see different physiotherapists, chiropractors, acupuncturists, homeopaths, healers. I visited a healing stone; tried dance therapy; different creams that were supposed to be the cure. I bathed my hands in hot and then cold water, wore bandages, wrist supports. None of it helped.
I will never forget a chat with a girl once on the way back from a folk music gathering in the mountains. She said: “Well you know, I really used to love rowing, it was my thing. But then I hurt my shoulder and I had to give it up and find something else. Maybe it’s like that with you and music”. I thought it was the meanest thing anyone could ever have said to me. I could not – and still cannot – imagine a life without music playing a central role in it (we’ll see about the next one). For me it was like losing part of my identity.
It took me many years to understand what was going on at that time.
A Perfectionist’s Struggle
I was always a high achiever. Not that I always wanted to be better than the others, much worse: I always had a genuine fear of failing completely.
It comes as no surprise that, even though my teachers were kind and understanding, I did feel the pressure of completing grades at the music school. To try and play every note perfectly. An expectation to go on to study classical violin.
I still struggle with the system of how classical music is being taught. In fact, everytime I think about it I get a bit angry and I am scared for young children that might have the joy of play robbed from them. But I like to think that it will just take some more years for a breakthrough that will bring along the integration of a better understanding of the nature of creativity. Of how to achieve a certain kind of “perfection” without the pressure of having to be perfect.
As for me, having learnt about my perfectionist tendencies and anxieties that seem to amplify and transform every bit of advice into a perceived obligation, I do realise that the same guidance might well have been just right for another person. Somebody that thrives more on, or is in fact depending on, external encouragement to “become better”. (I put this in quotation marks, because: what does it mean to become better anyways?!)
What I needed to hear however were these words: “You can play! Just take it easy, play slow. Play for a few minutes and then give it a break… there’s no panic!”
A Session in McGarrigle’s Pub in Sligo.
New Lands and Turning Points
Faced with the fact that for the unforseeable future I was unable to study violin or another instrument, or to hold down any job that would rely on the strength of my hands for an extended period of time, I came up with a temporary escape plan:
At the age of nineteen, I moved to Ireland to work as an au-pair for a year. What I didn’t know at the time was that I had acidentally emigrated. Some sixteen years later I am still here! But that’s a story for another day, or perhaps indeed it is not: for it was here that things slowly started to change.
Looking back, I can see that there were many factors that contributed to the recovery of my musical freedom. An overall much more relaxed lifestyle, a new beginning in a different country, being able to hold down a job that had nothing to do with music. But most importantly, I believe that I owe it to certain people and a couple of influential books that I finally was able to find my way back into playing.
When I landed in Sligo, I was lucky to fall in with a great gang of musicans. One of them in particular, Rodney Lancashire, repeatedly encouraged me to play without worrying about it. To play slow rather than not playing at all. To try and relax about it.
So, after having stopped completely for a couple of years, I took up the violin again – or perhaps, rather the fiddle this time around. Playing solely Irish traditional music for a few years, it proved quite therapeutic: starting to play slow and for short periods of time at first, I was increasingly able to play longer.
A few years later I started to study at UCC. It was in Cork that I met violinist Kathryn Doehner, who introduced me to a side-strand of Alexander Technique. Taking me on as a case study, she made me aware of what “good posture” really meant and the fact that when relaxed, anything was possible.
At around the same time, on the urgent advice of my friend Fergal O’Connor, I started to work with Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way (1992). This book absolutely changed my life: going into it with a mindset of “I’m not a real musician”, I came out of it having composed enough material to release my first CD, Amber Sands, in 2014! Learning about how to maintain a healthy relationship with creativity, it finally offered a way to escape the terrors of my inner perfectionist.
The last piece of the puzzle I was struggling to put together for the last seven years or so came in form of another book: it was Dr. John Sarno’s The Mind- Body Prescription (1999), recommended to me by saxophonist and composer Nick Roth, that finally set me free.
To give a very brief synopsyis of Dr. Sarno’s approach as I understand it: coming from a background of rehabilitative medicine, he believes that the chronic nature of the majority of repetitive strain injuries to do with tendons, nerves and muscles stem from suppressed or unsolved psychological distress.
As a last resort to grab our attention, the distress moves into the body from where we finally have to deal with it. Offering a simple and inexpensive solution, he explains that in many cases it is enough to simply learn about, and understand, the interrelated mechanism at work between the brain and the affected area of the body.
I have to say that, would I have read that book a few years earlier, I would not have been able to understand it. I believe that it was necessary to go through all the other approaches of treatment first, so that I could see that it was really up to me to solve this problem. But the right time had come.
I will not say that I never feel my hands or wrists getting tired anymore. But when they do now, on a rare occasion, I am not afraid anymore. I know that the pain will not linger. This very absence of the expectation of a pain to become chronic is one of the major keys to breaking the cycle. I have understood the principle, and most importantly, that there is absolutely nothing wrong with my hands.
In Awe of Music
The experience of being unable to play for such a long period of time was absolutely horrible – an early existential crisis perhaps. At the same time, faced with the fact that I might never be able to play again, I realised just how much of a fundamental role music played in my life. It forced me to acquire a deeper understanding of the nature of chronic pain that will serve me as a life lesson.
It got me to understand the importance to look after the mind, as well as the body, and I do so on a daily basis. It violently threw me out of the path I thought I should follow and slowly guided me into a very different life that I could only have dreamt of.
I don’t take music for granted anymore. From the point of secretly accusing everyone around me for putting so much pressure on me, to cursing my hands and wishing that I could just get a new pair; I have reached a point of understanding and a deep gratefulness for the fact that I can play again – for as long, fast or slow as I want to. Having found my way back to a state of playful curiousity that I remember from my early childhood, I am in total awe of music.
I still don’t know musically where I belong. Being classically trained as a pianist, but listening also to Jazz, World, Indi Pop, Nordic, Heavy Metal or Ambient music, and loving them all, I keep losing myself in whichever direction I go. I wouldn’t say I want to compose Heavy Metal, but I am influenced by many genres and many composers…
Also, maybe because, as a child, I never had this feeling of having a home. Being Armenian – although born in Lebanon and living the last twenty years in Germany – has had a huge impact on me. I’ve never been in Armenia although I always wanted to visit; at least to experience how it feels to be in the motherland.
Instead, I learned to believe home is where I feel safe and where I feel happy. Mostly, I am happy when I am creative; when I sit on the piano and ideas flow from my head into my fingers, without knowing what I’m playing, but it just feels right, at least in that moment.
Then, I think to myself “you’re doing great, this is beautiful”. I continue writing, I dedicate all my energy, ideas start to flow one after another, until the time comes, where I feel I have something to share.
That’s the moment where my self-destructiveness appears, as I begin to paint black thoughts, telling myself that what I have created is actually pretty boring. I start comparing myself to artists I love and respect.
I know that it is not the right thing to do. But I have no control over my thoughts. I keep pulling myself down until I hit rock bottom. Then there is only one way up. I gather myself and continue the work I started.
After many years of dealing with this situation, I am still the same, this habit is part of my daily life, sometimes I have better moods, other times less so.
The one thing I have really learned is to remind myself nothing stays the same. Creating music is like bringing life to something: once it emerges from your mind, it doesn’t belong to you any longer.
A mother will never think that her child isn’t good enough. I try to remind myself that after the thoughts are on paper: these doesn’t belong to me, and it’s not up to me to judge the piece. It is out into this world, and it will find its way.
I have to continue what I have started, and trust that work and effort are the only seeds to plant. Also, to live and feel alive. Music tells a story, and to tell a story you need to live. Sometimes, it’s sunny, other times stormy; life is full of such movements. Duality is part of this world, and I believe only when we accept both sides of the coin, will life become exciting.
I grew up with music, my father was a musician and had a band that performed Armenian music. I even used to sing on stage with him, when I was as young five. Almost every day growing up there were band rehearsals. Music was everywhere. And then I discovered the piano and Classical music.
Childhood.
I remember at aged thirteen it becoming clear to me that I wanted to be a pianist. So every day I came home after school and sat for many hours on the piano, before doing anything else. Playing Classical music became my own world. There I could create my own stories, be anything I wanted to be, transferring my feelings and emotions into the music and finding peace.
Playing with the Lebanese National Symphony Orchestra.
Music is now part of my being. One of the biggest achievements of my Classical career was playing the Schuman concerto with the Lebanese National Symphonic Orchestra, while I was studying in Germany. But that was also one of my latest concerts. A few years later, I developed a passion for composing, and my life took another path.
My latest album ’Una Corda Diaries’ is very special to me, as it was recorded on the Klavins concert Una Corda M189 in Budapest.
It is a musical diary. The idea came to me as I was visiting the Klavins workshop. Seven Days-Seven Pieces, is the story of the people, the atmosphere, the Una corda and my own experience discovering this unique instrument. I was also very lucky that I managed to complete the recording just few weeks before the pandemic hit and borders were closed.
After arriving in Germany to continue my studies, I realised that interpretation alone was not enough for me. I didn’t want to just repeat and play the repertoire which have been played a million times perfectly.
Also, I started feeling lonely and froze at the stage playing Classical music. I don’t know why, but the thing that I loved the most in the world started to make feel isolated. So I decided to stop, but again, after a while it was too difficult to live without the world I had created for myself through music. The place where I used to feel free was missing. Music had become part of my being. Tt was what I had become. And then I discovered composing.
Image Evgeny Ganeev.
My music is not purely Classical, nor is it neoClassical, nor jazz, and not Armenian. It dives through the lines, just like my feelings, belonging nowhere, which makes me feel awkward while also holding a wish to belong.
I love layers of melancholic melodies over each other, telling the same story from different perspectives, mostly centred around my instrument. My piano draws out all the emotions I want to express, sometimes through elegant soft notes, at other times with restless melodies, merging into each other. I also improvise sometimes, even though I like the process of working on an idea.
When I feel creatively blocked, and I have nothing but a dark space to wonder around, I prefer to stay still and take my time. My mind doesn’t stop working. I listen to a lot of music, I do research, I discover new artists, until I find my calmness and a clear path to put the melodies back on a paper.
Image: Ghazaleh Ghazanfari
One thing is for sure, whatever I write is the expression of my authentic feelings, which emerge out of my life experiences. I work through myself, confronting all the joy and the struggles I have inside me, to understand myself better, with the hope that people will connect to those musical and emotional expressions and find comfort in recognising their own stories.
All those words sound like I am pessimistic, but I am not. I’m only too self-critical, and about the music I create. But I also believe that only by repeating and failing can we get better.
I know that everything is a process to get somewhere. Perhaps I just need to enjoy the path more. I don’t want to belong to a genre or a style. The most important thing is for music to touch the heart, whether it is Classical or jazz, technical or slow; there is enough space in these world for all kinds of expression, as long as it is honest and true. True to the the artist first, and then to the person who feels connected to it.
I will never be entirely happy with what I have created, because I know there is always a better version, but I have learned to accept things the way they are for that moment, letting it go, making space for new experiences, and trusting the path that I am dedicated to walk.
I sit at the piano and a melody flows smoothly from my mind. I think “How great,” and quickly write it down, then continue playing and writing, playing and writing. Feels like I came up with something special this time. I become emotional with excitement and am very pleased. Then a moment passes, and nothingness. Thick darkness appears in front of me, as I realize that I am lying warm and cosy under the black sheets on my bed.
It was just a dream, again. And again I awaken, unable to remember the notes I had just dreamily composed. This is getting exhausting. A nightmare in reality. Again.
These dreams happen frequently when I am unable to compose for a period. Naturally, having downtime to put thoughts and emotions together is necessary for every artist. But sometimes the pause is much too long. The more I think in music, the more I feel in music, the more it builds in my head and must be released.
Sometimes I’m not even sure if I want to write music, or if I have to. Most of the time, it feels as though I have no choice. Melodies and harmonies; they take up so much space in my head. Growing and developing inside, they need to come out. And I have little control over it, so I comply and write it down.
The most joyful feeling I have is when I say to myself “Ok, looks like I have finished this piece.”
My debut album ‘Silhouettes’ contains ten pieces for string quartet. You will find a vivid example of my compulsion to write music in a piece called ‘Warum?’. The story behind this composition is sad, yet philosophical. Walking in a small Berlin park at the side of a cemetery, I came to a wall beside a few small gravestones lying in a row. Looking closer, I noticed from the dates that there were small children buried there.
Nearby, I hear many kids running around, laughing. Observing children happily playing and joyfully screaming with their peers under ground was a surreal moment. The juxtaposition engendered such strong emotions that I ran home to write them out of myself.
Another piece, called ‘Prayer’, came about spontaneously on a dark and rainy autumn evening. My mind was strained by feelings of longing and hopelessness, sadness and madness. I let them gush out, in tears and notes.
Most of my inspiration to write music comes from the world that surrounds me. I observe it daily on walks, in talks and relationships, reading news and watching events unravel. My music reflects all these emotions. Often, however, global events, leave me too upset to compose.
On these occasions I wish to hide from it all, to calm down. I like to imagine myself living on a farm somewhere, far away from everything, with a cat and a dog, growing my own vegetables.
It probably sounds like I have a love/hate relationship with music, but ‘Silhouettes’ was a turning point in my life – the fruition of a lifelong road in composition. The album was a long time coming despite a connection to music from early childhood, when my parents first took me to the music school.
Naturally, neither of them could have imagined the path I would take, nor would either of them have wanted me to have fallen under this spell. Now, after years of singing in choirs and playing many instruments (piano, guitar, violin, percussion, bagpipes), I fondly remember myself as a young teenager, sitting at the piano, writing my first pieces, thinking how I wanted to become a composer or a conductor.
I knew, even then, that I was not a performer, or at least I wasn’t able to discover MY instrument. But I always felt strongly that music was something I wanted to be connected to, that I wanted to dig deep into; that I wanted to understand from other perspectives – that I wanted to create.
Back then, perhaps I was afraid of the powerful feelings composing awakens. I don’t know. In the end, I selected sound design and engineering and dove deep into my studies. It was those significant experiences that are still helping me in many professional and conventional situations today.
Unfortunately, working with sound was never very comfortable for me. I spent my life looking to lose myself in one activity or another (I am still very passionate about photography, for example), but have since seen that nothing works as well for my mind as writing music.
At one time, I wanted to become a tattoo artist. I had been drawing and painting for many years and had even tattooed my own legs. For whatever reason, I left this idea behind (at least for now, but who knows in the future?).
I still regularly paint and draw, trying out different styles. It’s an important activity for me. I enjoy using watercolours and acrylics the most. Painting has one enormous benefit: I can listen to music while creating.
My musical taste may seem a little strange since I enjoy looping the same albums or songs, for hours or even days. But I can’t listen to music simply in the background – even when I loop something. I live the music every single time.
Throughout childhood, I listened more to classical music and different metal bands. But over the last few years, my playlists consist mostly of contemporary classical music, black metal, and Nick Cave. Recently, I’ve added a little techno, ambient and drone. But, one thing has always been clear to me: silence is the best music. And rain.
For two years, after completing my studies, I managed concerts in a classical music concert hall in Klaipeda. It was amazing working with musicians and composers from all over the world, as well as seeing two or three concerts a week.
Now I think about how every concert I’ve been a part of and all of the music I’ve listened to were lessons in themselves. They have directly contributed to my current compositional work.
In 2018, after many ups and downs and changing cities every two years (who wants to hear about my experience living in Moscow?), I began to seriously devote myself to composing. Leaving my past behind, I moved from Lithuania to Berlin, a city that I had only visited twice before, and where I didn’t know another person.
So I began writing music upon my arrival and in the early days of 2020 I released my first piece for strings, ‘Rituals’, which was inspired by Baltic mythology, folk music, and nature.
One year on came the release of the aforementioned debut album, ‘Silhouettes’, under the wonderful care of the Piano and Coffee Records label. I’m glad to say that the album was very well received and continues to touch people’s hearts. That makes me extremely happy, and certainly motivates me to keep moving forward.
As regards the future, to quote Jonas Mekas: ‘I have no idea what winds are driving me and where.’ Now, I am just grateful to be able to work on what I want. Whether it’s writing a new piece or allowing myself to live a slow life. I realise that this is a luxury for many and feel lucky to be able to enjoy it.
What comes later I do not know. But one thing is certain: new music will be coming out and hopefully soon.
Two months ago, after releasing my new album, Songs & Stories,Vol 1, I asked Irish composer Craig Cox to listen and offer his thoughts, without any prompting from me. Craig and I have worked together on several projects since I arrived in Ireland in 2012. His response resonated with me, so I will comment on parts of it here in order to explain my background, and what led me to write these songs.
The music on Alain Servant’s new album is a synthesis of his years of artistic vagrancy.
Vagrancy! This is a word that well summarises my artistic path. I started in theatre as an actor in my early teens and, at the age of sixteen, with eight friends, created a theatre company called ‘Tour de Babel’ (Tower of Babel). This adventure continued for over fifteen years. After moving from the Parisian underground scene to the French countryside, we created more than twenty shows, with the aim of meeting other cultures and using theatre as an intercultural laboratory. We always worked in collaboration with artists from other cultures, simultaneously immersing ourselves in them as we went along.
As an actor, director and musician, I was able to incorporate practices and visions from the Mediterranean world (Lebanon and Tunisia), Central America (Guatemala, Honduras, Panama and Cuba), Asia (India and China) and Europe. I discovered Indian Classical music and started practicing the sarod
Then the Turkish Oud.
But all adventures must come to an end! The company split up and we all parted on our own paths. I next created a residency space for artists in the countryside in France where all arts and artistic movements were welcome to create and experiment. Over a period of ten years, I met and practiced with clowns, jugglers, acrobats, theatre makers, butoh dancers…
Then, I arrived in Ireland! This island has become for me not only a personal nest but also a place in which to focus my practice.
Alain’s practice is fundamentally one based in narrative: his craft is the construction of worlds that hold up a warped mirror to the familiar, placing the listener inside an ethereal realm in which everything is distorted yet illuminated.
I am a storyteller. I am also an actor, writer and musician. In Ireland, I found that songwriting was a way of merging my practices. My head is filled with myths and stories, and I found in Ireland a fertile land for my imagination to blossom.
The dark earth and the cold sea have allowed the seeds of strange plants that I have carried all my life to take root in a peaceful garden, the poisonous and the medicinal growing side by side.
I sit now in this garden, picking these fruits and becoming intoxicated with their smells and the memories they recall in me. I am present in the here and now, but many dimensions overlap. And I sing my perceptions as they arise.
An appropriate adjective for this album is “multi-lingual”. Not simply in reference to the actual shifts between European tongues (so that the inherent musicality of language is demonstrated, it becoming a texture in itself), but also in reference to the musical world.
I have no real mother tongue. I spent my early childhood in Bolivia, speaking Spanish and listening the indigenous people speaking Quechua and Aymara. Arriving in France in Marseille, I learned French with a strong southern accent, then moved to Paris and, although fascinated by Classical French literature and poetry, I spent most of my time hanging around with the kids of my quartier learning argot, the Parisian slang that was very much alive at the time. And then English came for me, a language that seems to fit the songs I sing.
A language is a way of seeing the world, as well as its music, different frequencies that don’t strike the soul’s strings in the same way. It is not necessarily the language that drives me, but rather the language revealing itself through whatever the subject is. A rock in a high mountain sings in Spanish, and a tree by a gentle river in French. What language would a bottle of whiskey lying in the gutter speak? I am this rock, this tree and this bottle of whiskey!
Moving through this album is like rolling through the shifting narrative structure of a dream, each track morphing into the next so that an overall tone manifests and an internal metaphorical logic constructed, with references to flowers, flowing water and undeath mushrooming and acting as way points that trick the listener’s memory while revealing the underlying subtext of an almost squalid hopefulness: a unique wisdom that weaves piss and vinegar parables, speaking reassurances in hoarse tones.
For me, any creative act is a journey into the subconscious world. I jump into unknown depths and come back laughing, clutching some new treasures that become songs or something else. In these depths, I meet gods, kings and queens, slaves, even children playing with wild animals…
Any new creation is a cathartic process that brings me back to a world of wonder. The logic emerges by itself with no conscious will. I try to follow the natural movement of expansion and contraction. And it can be hard work! As hard as the craft of the blacksmith at times. Because art is a craft, and demands skills, experience and practice.
I would like to conclude with a word on collaboration. Collaboration is essential for me. The creative process at times can be solitary, but becomes useless if there’s no transformation through exchange.
I was lucky in Ireland to encounter John Linnane, one of the best musicians and performers I have ever met.
Since 2017, we have worked together and performed together and I would like to thank him, not only because he’s a great artist, but also because he’s a great human being. It is an honour to have him beside me in this adventure.
My musical taste may seem a little strange since I enjoy looping the same albums or songs, for hours or even days. But I can’t listen to music simply in the background – even when I loop something. I live the music every single time.