WOASCHES: January 2015

When did you first encounter music ?

I was a boy when I first listened to a Listz record and I really was overhelmed by it.

Could you inform us about the main steps of your music training?

Once I was very keen on classical music and I was member of the association “gioventù musicale” (music youth), so I attended to all the concerts at the Verdi concert hall of Milan Conservatory.

Later I started to play piano and I enrolled in the course of electronic music held by Angelo Paccagnini. He was a great music teacher and a wide-opened musician who liked improvisation and every kind of music experience. I think that I owe my present status of musician and teacher to his way of being. Probably other teachers would have brought me to stop my studies.

Angelo Paccagnini

Composer, Executor and Teacher , do you think that these three roles are perfectly balanced in your music activity or do you think they cold be better distributed ?

Teaching is very nice, I always learn something in my relationship with my pupils they are often very brilliant.

Composer and Executor are normally different roles in Western tradition, but I normally melt them because I need to be both, considering that I love working through improvisation, which is something like an instantaneous composition.

Do you see teaching like a source of inspiration and learning?

Off Course, the relationship with my pupils brings to a mutual exchange that gives me the opportunity to stay up-to-date. This kind of relationship is bidirectional the more you teach the more you learn.

I think it would be interesting to spend a few words on the evolution of your relationship with Milan Conservatory from student to teacher.

My relationship with Paccagnini was based on consideration and friendship so he took me with him, as an assistant, even during his summer advanced courses. After my diploma I was a trainee so I continued to stay at the Conservatory to teach to the students of the first year.

When Paccagnini became the director of Milan conservatory and left teaching, his place was taken by Riccardo Bianchini ,one of his students, who had ended his studies when I started mine. After some time he moved to Rome so I took his place and started to teach at Milan conservatory where I’m also teaching nowadays.

Could you speck us about “Esemble Elettroacustico” and “Uroboro Orchestra”?

Since long we started a course of improvisation with electronic instruments, at the beginning I did it with Gaetano Liguori ,who also had been a student of Angelo, but it was a problem for the Conservatory to have a course with 2 teachers so I had to go on alone with the students of our department.

You can see some of the results of this work on my youtube channel.

What kind of role has improvisation in your music and in your activity as a composer?

An important role I think, I always try to find a balance between the opposed polarities of composition and improvisation.

Futuro Antico

Which were the effects of Milano music effervescence during the seventies on your music?

It was a time full of life and new ideas, I was thinking that it was time to free ourselves from the conditioning of avant-garde music which had become academy, later everything returned slowly to normality and monotony, luckily today I rediscovered in young people the wish to go back to creative liberty.

When did you start with electronic music? And when dates back your love for African an Middle-East sounds?

Probably at the end of the seventies when I bought an electric piano and started to listen to contemporary composers like Berio and Stockhausen but also to the music of Ravi Shankar and similars. In the meantime I started also to listen to jazz and musicians like Jimi Hendrix with a great primordial force and sounds that were not so distant from cultured avant-garde.

In 1973 I bought my Moog.

Which are your present feelings towards your solo works Watertube/ringspiel;Riflessi;Scorrevole 3/Fluttuazioni and Correnti Magnetiche?

I always like them, and sometimes I listen to them with pleasure.

Could you tell us extensively about the activity of the artistic nucleus “Correnti Magnetiche”?

The group started after my meeting with Mario Canali and from our mutual passion for digital art and symbolism.

At the beginning I prepared the videos in basic and the music for Mario, but later we thought that it was better to share the tasks and so I continued only with music. We were developing the concept of collective art so we included in the group Flavia Alman & Sabine Reiff for the visual part and Tommaso Leddi, Gabin Dabirè and Maurizio Dehò for the music.

We started to do live concerts where Mario was painting on a drawing board connected to a projector following our improvisations.

With concerts, videos and installations we were everywhere and we gained many awards. At the Ars Electronica Festival we unbelievably won the second prize after John Lasseter of Pixar who had behind him a big organisation and the money of Steve Jobs.

Unfortunately Mario gave up , tired of digital complications, and moved to Laurel Canyon (Los Angeles), a well known place thanks to John Mayall ,where he returned to traditional painting.

Anyhow we keep in contact.

And what about the birth of Futuro Antico?

After the return of Walter Maioli from a 4 years long Eastern trip we met and we started to play together (first Lp of Futuro Antico) after a while Gabin Dabirè , who Walter had known in Nepal, joined and there was a sudden harmony between us.

Is it correct to consider Futuro Antico as a natural evolution of Aktuala?

I think so, considering that Walter was the mind behind Aktuala.

Futuro Antico started with auto-production of 2 cassettes can you tell us the story behind?

We created a cultural association and we produced cassettes to be sold during our concerts, we were helped by a crew of friends and passionate collaborators.

Why was your first album published in Brasil?

Because we were contacted by the producer Antonio Petikov ,a Brasilian of Russian origins, who was very fond of our work.

Are you satisfied by recent represses of this first album and the cassette by the label Blacksweat?

Yes a lot, also because it was a big success, they are doing already the third repress in one year and they are preparing also the CD version.They are young and very correct and like ADN they do it because they love music and not for business, as myself.

And what can you tell us about the lost CD “Intonazioni Archetipe”?

It was made in a very limited edition as a test. We were recently contacted by a label of Florence who wants to print it as an LP.

Futuro Antico is a group in “hibernation” or do you think that its artistic adventure has come to an end?

We are trying to organize some concerts in spring 2015 with the help of Blacksweat so probably the hibernation will be over.

You were also a stable member of Doubling Riders, can you tell us how you joined this already existing group and how you contributed to its evolution?

We came in contact through Marco Veronesi of ADN , we were in the same label, and I licked very much the concept of this group based on distant collaborations of different artists. So I started to collaborate and I was part of the group.

Doubling Riders anticipated the internet era , but at the time the magnetic tapes were sent through post accompanied by a letter and all was very slow.

Are you also, like Franceso Paladino, considering Garama like the more accomplished work of the group?

Also the double Lp on ADN is very nice.

The Doubling Riders

Could you speack us about the project Swimmers Quartet /Quintet?

The project was conceived by Alzek Misheff a painter performer of great energy who involved me, Maurizio Barbetti viola, Rocco Parisi bass clarinet, Maurizio Dehò violin and many other collaborators for some concerts like Charles Amirkhanian, Theodosii Spassov and the great Don Buchla.

RICCARDO WITH WALTER MAIOLI

How important do you find the collaboration from a compositive and esecutive point of view with other musicians?

Very important because I believe in collective art and in the meetings of persons who share love for sounds and are open to every development.

I also like to play alone, but in this case I know that what I’m doing is foreseeable. Much more exciting and risky is to be contaminated by others and even by other aesthetics.

Sergio Armaroli Mario De Leo

Yuval Avital Ahmed Fakrun Pietro Pirelli

During your long music career you collaborated with many musicians, some of these collaborations found their way to a phonographic support ( Sergio Armaroli, Mario De Leo, Ahmed Fakrun, Italo Bertolasi) other not(Yuval Avital,Ahmed Ben Diab, Pietro Pirelli etc. etc). Did these musicians broaden your already wide music frontiers?
Off Course, lately I’m working with my students that are coming from the techno-noise and other kind of experiences.. and even if sometimes I feel perplexed I think they are animated by my same passion.

What kind of music do you listen when you are not at work and which are the musicians you consider essential for your music knowledge?

My teacher Angelo Paccagnini and: Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Miles Davis, Gustav Mahler, J.S. Bach, Igor Strawinski, Bela Bartok, Franz Listz, Keith Jarrett, Terry Riley, John Hassel, Led Zeppelin, Lou Reed, Third ear band, Arab, Saharian and Iranian music ecc....
These are only the first names that come to my mind.

What about your future projects?
A new CD with Sergio Armaroli and Maurizio Dehò a very good ensemble, I think. Next spring we will try to organize some concerts od Futuro Antico.
And than we’ll see……