Luciano Maggiore is a Sicilian musician and composer based in London. His works, made particularly through the use of pre-recorded and assembled sound materials, place the emphasis on the materiality of sound. Together with Louie Rice he founded NO-PA/PA-ON in 2017, a project focused on performing scores written by other artists and by themselves.
Listening to your works, what immediately comes to mind is your use of sound materials; do you start from a compositional work with a subsequent collecting of sounds, or do you instead start from a series of recordings already in your archive? And what kind of materials do you prefer to work with?
I would say that both of the processes you describe can define my way of working, and that it depends a lot on the composition.
Sometimes I start from a sketched idea of a composition and gather around that idea a palette of sounds that may or may not end up inside the work, and sometimes, vice versa, I begin to investigate and create the sounds and try to understand what shape they want to take and what nature their succession or grouping suggests to me. I try to glimpse the world that should host them.
But this is a very generic discourse that could betray itself and that I don't mean as a rule. Every record seems to have its own reason for being and its own procedures.
As for the materials I prefer to work with, I really wouldn't know how to answer. Things that didn't interest me at all for years become extremely important, and conversely others that have almost always been present become irrelevant. I wouldn't put it in terms of preferences. Let's say that I always try to respond to needs of my own.
When you start working on recorded sounds, do you know precisely what you want to obtain? How much unpredictability exists in your pieces, and how much can it come to give a direction to the work?
I know some of their qualities and I look for those qualities using techniques that leave room for the unforeseen. The working techniques, however, are often fixed a priori, so the result is surprising yes, but also in some way foreseen. To give you an example, if I choose to use a mechanism that makes a certain sound move from right to left, I certainly know that the sound will end its path on the right of the stereo image, and what will surprise me will be the time it takes to get there or the movements it makes between point A and point B.
And this kind of surprise decidedly gives a direction to the work and influences the decisions I will take each time in building the pieces.
In many of your releases it seems to me that an attempt emerges to define reality through musical metalanguages. There is a lot of talk about sound and music within your records, sometimes exposing the process, leaving in or cutting part of the noises present in the materials, or as in the latest “necesse est numquam revelare stercorem tuum”, made together with Michael Speers, in which you ‘distill’, in an almost alchemical process, the core of black metal, as written in the short note accompanying the release. I may be risking a banal question, but do you think music should speak about something, besides itself?
I'm delighted with this question because it's the first time I've been asked about metalanguage in my work!
I don't know whether music should speak about something besides itself, and I'm not against trying to convey messages or, even better, meanings through art. I don't deal with meanings. I'm interested in the progress of forms, and therefore in art for art's sake.
With Michael Speers we often found ourselves talking about Metal while looking at records that canonically weren't metal but that gave off an aura that spoke of it. We spent some time in the studio recording distorted guitars and fake growling until we found ourselves working on this thing that is probably not black metal but that tastes of black metal.
Going back to the heart of your question, I'm inclined to say that perhaps music always speaks about music by making statements about itself. Trivially, if you choose to make a Rock 'n' Roll record you add another definition or opinion to the history of opinions linked to that genre. And it seems to me that this statement can be extended to everything and that it is what art history does continually.
A record I'm curious to hear you say something about is “pietra e oggetto”, released in 2020 on Kohlaas. In its being so ‘raw’, exposing sounds and noises one after the other, as I mentioned above, it seems to want to define environments through an estrangement of the senses, to know them through auditory experience before visual.
Pietra e oggetto is a record that in hindsight I consider part of an unannounced trilogy, of which I was unaware, whose first two parts are 9 enclosures (senufo editions) and locu (dinzu artefacts).
The three records share a very reduced palette of sounds and a similar way of using stereophony and negative spaces. In my head the three works speak of three ways of looking at the same way of organizing sound but from different points of view. They are three views of the same planet.
I find it a psychedelic record, just as my latest one, self-talk, is.
Michael Speers, going back to what I was saying before, said that locu was a Black Metal record :)
Speaking of which, listening again these days I was reminded of an answer Francesco Cavaliere gave me a few months ago. He told me that he imagined his ideal soundscape as “all the sounds of the landscape I find myself in with at least 13 seconds of silence between one sound and another, no sonic overlap except for the splintering of wood and the wind on the leaves if there is any”, and I found it very akin to “pietra e oggetto”. So I almost feel obliged to ask you too: how do you imagine your ideal soundscape?
Francesco is an old friend and I feel very close to his ideal of soundscape.
I have to say that I've never asked myself the question. I look for simple places of sound, where few things happen and each leaves space for the others to manifest, simultaneously, if in the same environment. One after another, if on the same timeline.
I have never managed to see you live, so I have to ask you: how much and how do your processes of composition and performance change, and how do they meet, if they do at all?
The two fields of work are totally different. For work on record you have to take certain things into account and for live work others. On a record the sounds are fixed and irremovable. The decisions made will remain sedimented forever in that temporal segment with no possibility of intervention. Any reasoning about the listener's attention is of little use, since you cannot control the way the listener will deal with the composition.
Live, things change: I work with iron rules and often the performative element, however minimal, has a large compositional component. It is a signature with a presence as important as the sounds that will be produced. The representation of sound is no longer frontal but instead crosses and inhabits the space, as do the performer and the spectator. The composition of the intervention does not move only along a temporal line but intersects various spatial and behavioral lines and ways of experiencing presence (both that of the musician and that of the listening body in the moment).
The two approaches have different levels of difficulty. Both, however, feed on previous work and I feel them to be permeable to each other. Sometimes a live show can be the occasion to enlarge a microscopic element of a record and vice versa. With each of the two media I can do things that I find difficult to do with the other. And both approaches are part of a history of ideas that follows a common thread, even if apparently illegible.
Still on the live side, through videos and accounts I caught up with some of the performances that you carry out together with Louie Rice since 2019 under the name NO-PA/PA-ON, in which you perform your own scores or those of other artists. Here, in the wake of the late twentieth-century avant-garde, and I think of Fluxus as a first reference, the recourse to physical and performative action is very strong, to create a sort of non-music. Which aspects do you reflect on most in selecting the scores you perform or those you compose?
We started working together in 2017 performing historical scores or ones that other artists wrote for us. We soon abandoned that to make room for our own production. We've never done much "philosophy" about our work together, relying more on taste or intuition in choosing the scores or creating them.
Things we have insisted on over the years are a sharp stereophony, phasing, and a certain dryness, all elements that were already present in both of our solo work and that brought us together in search of a common territory of work.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →