Lorenzo Abattoir is a sound artist and performer from Turin.
Rooted in the noisiest underground, through countless projects and heterogeneous collaborations (Vomir, Herman Kopp, Satori, Phurpa, Giovanni Lami), his prolific activity touches on mysterious and dark themes, often through a radical use of the body and of machines.
Let's start from a theme that I think is present in your most recent work. Listening to your music one often has the impression of being inside the entrails of a beast, in a tight dialectic between inside and outside: of the body, of the instrument, of the world (physical-metaphysical, but also the world of the living and the world of the dead). What is your relationship with the viscera?
Yes, I find that an excellent description. I have a good relationship with viscera (at least my own!) and everything that happens inside us fascinates me. Our perceptual organs are constantly turned outward; when I discovered that by using microphones I could amplify and explore internal sounds, the potential of this process became clear to me right away. Instead of yet another field recording job in nature, I prefer to focus on our inner nature.
It seems that even in your densest and most articulate compositions (for example those of A.throat.full.of.earth) an abyss dwells, an ineluctable void. I can't tell whether it is a matter of total thematic absence, or even of the mix (a hole at the center of the stereo image), or something deeper.
Actually, I always start from a theme or a concept through which I build the whole sound work. In practice, I don't begin a recording without having an idea of the theme to be tackled. That said, perhaps the void you refer to is part of the concept. "A.throat.full.of.earth", for example, was made entirely by recording the sounds of my personal equipment (guitar effects, oscillators, etc.) while it was being completely destroyed. In 2018 I had accumulated a lot of gear by then, so I made the radical decision to abandon my usual, by now habitual, methods, physically destroying every part of my effects chain. Indeed, the title of the album is meant to suggest an image of "obstruction", a sort of incommunicability, like the sensation of a throat full of earth.
Whether it's microphones inside a piano or sound distorted in various ways, you make great use of recording and sound-processing techniques that are anything but orthodox. I am curious to know what the relationship is between your work as a sound engineer (often specified in your bios) and that of composer and performer.
I studied as a sound engineer, then by chance ended up making music for theater but, more than anything else, I have always been interested in performative actions of every kind. The use of unorthodox techniques has always been, for me, a necessity linked to my innate curiosity: for example, when you study microphones, one of the first "rules" you run into is not to blow into them, which led me to want to explore not only the strongest, closest blow I could manage but also the various kinds of distortion I can obtain by blowing into different microphones and so on.
I like the limits of a machine very much because they are usually set in order to prevent possible malfunctions, but once the mental factor is overcome (for example the red light on the mixer), I am free to move in territories that are not unexplored but certainly less trodden than the more traditional ones.
In the Flag Day Recordings catalog your new record "Disincarnazione" appears right next to Dave Phillips's latest: it is evident that your aesthetics and research share many common aspects. Can we say that you are a disciple of the Shimpfluch-gruppe (a Swiss collective coordinated by Rudolf Eb.er and including Phillips himself as well as Daniel Löwenbrück, Joke Lanz, Marc Zeier, active mainly in the 1990s, dedicated to actionism and a peculiar production of extreme musique concrète)?
Dave is a friend, we have shared the stage a few times and some time ago we collaborated on a track. Let's say our research certainly has many aspects in common even though it differs in many ways. I am able to fixate on a single sound for the same span of time in which Dave would use, say, about fifty. In any case I greatly admire his research in the performative field. Speaking of Shimpfluch, I also know Rudolf, with whom I have had various interesting discussions, so we can say I am a sort of non-believing disciple.
To finish, a more biographical question: how did you come to create the strongly performative and ritual live shows that characterize you? Will the new set be on the same wavelength?
Let's say that what I do now came about following "A.throat.full.of.earth". As mentioned before, after recording that record I found myself with my usual set-up completely destroyed, which forced me to think of something completely new, compelling me to start over from the basics: microphones and mixer (the only things I had left). I began to think of a whole series of actions I could do and record, starting from fire as a generator of primordial light and sound with matches and charcoal, recording long sessions in the dark and then creating a performance that I presented at the LUFF festival in 2020. The new set, instead, is entirely based on various breathing techniques, employed in making the new album "Disincarnazione", and relates very closely to all the sound work carried out inside the human body in order to recreate a sort of animal / bestial transformation. So the new set is entirely performative and ritualistic, in the broadest sense of the term.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →