Valerio Tricoli is an Italian musician and composer, born in 1977 in Palermo. In his practice he makes extensive use of recorded and processed sound sources, as well as synthetic sounds, to create concrete, material sonic narratives, poised between the real and the elusive. Over the years he has collaborated with many musicians and artists such as Werner Dafeldecker, Hanno Leichtmann, Anthony Pateras, Ecka Mordecai, Thomas Ankersmit, Stefano Pilia, Mattin and others. His latest solo work, "A Circle of Grey," was released by Xong, the sound series of Xing, in 2023.
MM
To begin with, I'd like to discuss with you a feeling I had when I first listened to your music. It has always seemed to me that within the field of "historicized" musique concrète there was the problem of fitting into a genre system, whereas your works gave me a positive shock because of their profoundly cinematic aspect and their narrative made of sound images.
VT
Yes, which is perhaps true of other composers of musique concrète as well. What you say about this progressive transformation of musique concrète from a modus operandi into a "manner" is a bit of a Schaefferian problem. You know how Luc Ferrari, for example, was somewhat ostracized within GRM by Pierre Schaeffer: because he didn't modify the sounds enough, because he was too documentary. But if we read Schaeffer's theoretical texts, the musique concrète he was looking for was supposed to be a universal language, an open system, a new way of conceiving and creating music in opposition to "abstract" music. Simply: the art of sounds fixed on a medium. For me, musique concrète remains the art of sounds fixed on a medium, without discrimination of any kind, of ethnicity, genre or creed, and in spite of the "historicization" of which the very "inventor" of the term made himself an accomplice.
For me even works like the classics of William Basinski, for example, are musique concrète. Someone with a more academic outlook will say "no, never," because musique concrète is what is made within the GRM, with this kind of approach to sonic material, to the studio, with that kind of effects, and, today, with that kind of snobbery… yes, perhaps that is also true from a historicist perspective, but I prefer to remain a bit more universal in my conception of what can be called "musique concrète."
As for the cinematic aspect, I find it in many other composers too; Parmegiani often has a cinematic approach, Michel Chion, Lionel Marchetti... then perhaps it's the kind of cinema you make that is different.
MM
Still on this subject, on GOLEM we recently discussed a possible new "becoming a genre" of musique concrète, with its own idiomaticity…
VT
For me musique concrète is really not very idiomatic. When I compose I don't set myself the problem of creating sounds that sound like "musique concrète," that have that GRM sound, for example. Maybe it's not an academic approach, and maybe it's not what I would teach to students, but in principle for me certain DJs, in their own way, are already making musique concrète. I come back to Basinski, who is an excellent example, because his most famous works cannot exist outside the medium. And the medium itself and its decay are a very strong and essential part of his sound: why isn't "The Disintegration Loops" musique concrète? I don't know, and nobody could explain it to me in an incontrovertible way.
The distinction between musique concrète and electronic music is also a bit vague today, and perhaps always has been. Many things by Parmegiani – in truth the ones I like least – are musique concrète because he was French; had he been German perhaps they wouldn't have been defined that way.
John Cage's "Williams Mix," and we're talking about the early 1950s, is evidently musique concrète, a bit bizarre of course, because it was constructed from an extremely detailed score. But even that is musique concrète for me, even though it was made in New York and not in Paris.
MM
…and don't you think there is a risk of forming a somewhat stale stylistic brand instead of an authorial one?
VT
If at some point in my piece I want to put in a song, sung and played by me, as I have in fact done, that's fine, isn't it? I don't worry about style, about shelves.
MM
Exactly that, also because I find it something a bit dangerous, no? Let's say that seen from the outside it may be viewed as a moment of maturity of a form, but then doesn't it risk no longer offering anything new except at the level of types of sounds.
VT
Indeed, if you go listen to the pieces of the classic students of musique concrète or electroacoustic music, it's almost always that stuff. I don't make that music. So perhaps for them I don't make musique concrète and I'm just an asshole who minds his own business, so be it. All the better, in fact.
MM
It reminds me a bit of this quote from Giacinto Scelsi: "One must reach the heart of sound: only then are you a musician, otherwise you are only a craftsman. A craftsman of music deserves respect, but is neither a true musician nor a true artist."
VT
And how did Scelsi define himself?
MM
I think a guru.
VT
He had someone else do the craftsman's work. I don't know if you're familiar with Scelsi's compositional practice. It's very strange, because he made, so to speak, a musique concrète in reverse. He recorded while improvising, making big tapes of improvisations with instruments of various kinds, even electronic ones, and also with a "noise" approach, and when parts of those recordings seemed interesting to him, he had his collaborator transcribe them onto a score.
That said, between guru and craftsman, I'm a craftsman, there you go. Or maybe a farmer. Growing these potatoes, very often it takes me a whole season.
MM
Right, speaking of the sound sources you use, I was interested in asking you how you go about creating and manipulating them. I think a lot is already known about your use of the Revox…
VT
The Revox is used at a later moment, after having identified and captured the sounds to use: very rarely are they field recordings, for the most part it's foley work done at home or in the studio. I draw sounds from acoustic instruments, or objects of every kind, or synthesizers, and I modify them on tape, filter them, put them together.
MM
Do you usually start by collecting them for the composition you have in mind, or do you tend to start from sounds you already have?
VT
No, I never have a composition in mind. My way of proceeding is completely concrete and experimental. I almost always begin with the construction, mostly improvised, of a reel of tape with sounds manipulated both through the recorder itself and through the computer. In this reel I glimpse the skeleton of some parts, a usable structure, and from there begins a work of chiseling, of overdubbing, of composition, in short. It may happen that of the initial skeleton nothing sonic remains in the end, and what remains instead is everything that was built around it.
I start from a sonic mass, more or less heterogeneous, that already contains a kind of structure, which I begin to chisel, to reduce and to expand with sonic materials that are increasingly specific to the idea that is slowly manifesting itself.
Then I often find myself with unfinished compositions, which I don't like or which found no space in the project at hand. These leftovers often find new life in a new piece, years later. In each of my works there is a temporal stratification of years. In a work of today, a single guitar note that I had recorded in 2005 may pop up.
Then of course every record has its own history: for example the latest one, "A Circle of Grey," is much more "synthetic" than my past works. What I'm working on now, instead, is largely mixed directly on tape, with the crayonage technique.
MM
Speaking of your current output, last year you released a really huge amount, ranging widely in sonorities and style. I was struck, for example, by the difference between the more musical forms of the records you released in tandem with Werner Dafeldecker and Ecka Mordecai and your solo composition for Xong collection.
VT
Yes, I really have released a ton of records… since late 2022 there have been "Say Goodbye To The Wind," "Le Diable probablement" with Dafeldecker and Mattin, "Der Krater" again with Dafeldecker and "Chateau Mordecoli" with Ecka Mordecai. Then "Cantor Park" with Stefano Pilia and "A Circle of Grey" for Xong. Soon a new one will come out with Hanno Leichtmann. As for musicality, I imagine you mean traditionally musical. "A Circle of Grey," despite your perception, is in its own way a record of melodies. Of course, at times a bit hidden in this desolate environment, but it is full of melodic material from beginning to end, unlike any other previous work of mine.
The record with Werner, on the other hand, despite the use of the double bass, has no melody in it, and from a timbral and harmonic point of view and in its conception it resolves itself into a material, underground mass that tries to rise, to abstract itself. I find it a more difficult work. On the work with Ecka we agree, instead: obviously it is very musical even in traditional terms.
These are not collaborations chosen at random, I collaborate with musicians who lead me to approach music in an ever different way, as far as possible: when I play with Hanno, for example, the magical world of rhythm, real rhythm, opens wide, and I am dragged toward directions that I would hardly take on my own.
MM
I liked hearing you say something about "A Circle of Grey." I also remember the presentation live show in Florence where you played various devices, analog and digital, and how you had greatly expanded the pieces that ended up on the record.
VT
"A Circle of Grey" had a different genesis from anything I've ever done, since it is a record made properly on commission.
So we have to start with Silvia Fanti and Daniele Gasparinetti of Xing, a Bolognese organization with which I have collaborated in various capacities for some twenty years now. With them in the first decade of this century I curated a series of concerts of international experimental music, "Desco Music"; together we invented new formats between (musical) performance and installation such as Phonorama; or Hypnomachia, a series of what are now called "sleeping concerts," but when we did them nobody else was doing them; naturally I have performed several times in their Bolognese space, Raum. Experiences that undoubtedly contributed to my artistic growth, and in a certain sense represented a springboard for me.
As I was saying, Silvia and Daniele gave life to a label, Xong collection – dischi d'artista (artist records): it is a "project-based" label that will comprise a certain number of releases, I think twenty or thirty, and then cease to exist. The releases, on vinyl only, are entrusted to artists of the Italian (and not only) performance scene who work across disciplines and with whom Xing has had continuing collaborations over time. In the end the label seems to me a great sonic portrait of the scene that has revolved around Xing and has taken shape over the last twenty years. Coming back to me, obviously Silvia and Daniele asked me to create something for this occasion, and they gave me, unlike my practice consolidated over the years, a precise deadline for delivering the work. In truth this apparent limitation - having to complete the work within a few months – turned out to be a great opportunity and, I hope, a lesson for the future: fewer second thoughts and a very clear intention.
Without dwelling too long on the record itself – I like to think that it should be the music that speaks - I will say that I personally consider it among my best works, and I believe I managed, in these two sides of pristine vinyl, to syncretize in a fairly clear and "contemporary" way some of those opposites at the base of my sonic research: alienation and empathy, fracture and continuity, the elsewhere and the here and now... Come to think of it, all terms that also represent my history with Xing.
As for the live show, as is normally my habit, I improvised, using the materials present on the record, but recombining them in a different way and with elements foreign to the original composition.
I use a sampler, from which I trigger the sounds that I manipulate and organize live with the reel-to-reel recorder, and a CDJ with which I play more elaborate parts, more composed if you will, but on which I can still intervene in terms of pitch, duration etc. These are the tools I use: Revox, sampler, CDJ and a reverb.
MM
And by the way, how much does the process of improvisation change between the compositional process and the performance?
VT
Live I improvise as much as possible, in the sense that my sampler in any case contains a number of sounds, a truly boundless number, which I then put together with the Revox according to the perception of the moment.
In my compositional method, one starts from something similar, from putting sounds together through the reel-to-reel recorder and seeing what comes out, but afterward there is the whole, very long, part of actual composition, of choosing these materials, of cleaning, of elimination, of layering, of overdubbing, of very precise and often exhausting editing. Of course, in principle the use of the reel-to-reel recorder, at least the way I use it, always leaves room for many unforeseen events. Both live and in the studio. Many sounds, many structures too, in my music, manifest themselves on their own, without any conscious intention. It's a bit mediumistic: I set in motion a process in which, eventually, something reveals itself. And this I believe is specific to the use of this type of machine: leaving the doors wide open to the unexpected...
MM
Of course, one factors the unexpected into the result, the creation of those artifacts that can come out of that manipulation and it becomes a unicum.
VT
There are things I do on the recorders of which, for example, I can't even be aware while I'm doing them. For example, recording while turning the reels by hand: while you record you get the sounds you are listening to, but if afterward you play the reel back "normally," at fixed speed, then you have entirely different sounds, an entirely different structure, which you had never heard and couldn't hear while you were creating them. And there is music that you made, the machine made, and chance made.
MM
Another thing I wanted to ask you was who your references were when you started playing and composing, and what you think may have remained from these inspirations?
VT
When I started, we're talking about the mid-1990s, I really liked Bernhard Günter, a name that has since rather disappeared from circulation. He made this musique concrète, electroacoustic music, in which everything was very small, very low in volume, but also very tactile. From a rhythmic, or structural, point of view, he had this almost Beckettian prose-like gait. Made of pauses, of waiting, of unveilings.
MM
I wanted to come back to the record you released for Xong because the series has a rather particular form. Both in its direction, in managing to include artists coming from different practices yet very coherent in its unfolding; and in this solely physical format that today seems something surreal, no? What do you think? It seems strange even to ask, the fact of having to put the record on the turntable in order to be able to enjoy it…
VT
What do I think of the digital nonexistence of the works? Had it been up to me, I would never have done such a thing. It takes real courage, but Silvia and Daniele are crazy, dreamers... This label takes shape a bit as a utopia, a wonderful place of music outside our phones.
MM
But what is your relationship with the physical product?
VT
I'm not a collector of anything. Of nothing at all. I own a great many records, bought above all up to the moment when, if I wanted to listen to the music I desired, I could only buy it, buy it on CD.
I'm not a particular fan of vinyl in itself. Between flaws and merits, I see many more flaws. Above all the duration, this limit of 18, 20 minutes per side, per single "sound experience." It's fine for records made of many songs, many pieces, but in my case, very often I would like to make 40, 50 minutes, or even more if need be.
MM
I remember a polemic by Morton Feldman about the fact that contemporary composers had by then standardized themselves to making their pieces fit on one side of a record…
VT
Yes, it's a very serious thing, very serious. And one I am ashamed of, because unfortunately I'm certainly not exempt from this standardization.
Nevertheless, CDs don't sell. My record on Shelter Press, "Say Goodbye To The Wind," came out only on CD, because it consisted of three pieces, one of which almost half an hour long.
But if the label publishes only the CD, it almost seems that it took the work not very seriously, because it invested little money in it. And therefore fewer reviews, fewer "posts," less visibility, fewer concerts for the authors.
Obviously the music, with respect to these discussions, is somewhere else entirely.
MM
And then there are labels that print only CDs and are very serious. But it's true, maybe it's the aesthetics, maybe it's that it's a slightly retro medium, but they are a bit of short circuits…
VT
And the short circuit is the one that says: "if I have to have it digitally, I might as well download it, I'll listen to it directly from the platform." In the end if I have to spend my money on an object, I want this big cover, this big piece of plastic engraved with a slightly antiquated technique.
Of course then they often sound good, but there are various things that exist in music, and many more that exist in electroacoustic music, that vinyl simply cannot do at all...
MM
Of course, certain frequencies, spatializations…
VT
Out-of-phase sounds, M/S mixes… Coming back to Xong, this vision of theirs of doing only vinyl and having no online presence of the record seems right to me. Because in that case the object is no longer a collector's fetish, a vinyl that I keep sealed in order to then sell it in a few years on Discogs. Vinyl is given back its true nature as a medium for music, as an object to be used and not collected.
MM
The record (in this case a vinyl as white as a "page" or a "scene to be performed") is also the physical medium that preserves an artistic gesture, given that Xing works with live arts, which are ephemeral. In short, on the one hand the creation of artists who perhaps would never have made a record, and on the other the very act of listening on the turntable becomes almost being there, a performative act.
VT
It becomes almost performative, of course! But we're now in an era in which pulling an object out of a sleeve to put it on a cumbersome mechanism, lifting a little arm, placing it in the groove, is really a lot compared to the sequence of clicks, or rather vague rubbings, that make up all or nearly all of our daily experience.
English translation of the Italian original. Read the original →