[Still waiting to be reunited with my CD collection! So this episode is not exactly centered on a particular work, but rather on Prokofiev himself. There are a few suggestions below, of course.]

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My love affair with Prokofiev started by chance, and it happened after years of not really listening to a lot Classical music. I caught a movement of his first piano concerto on the radio and I was immediately won over by the newness of his language, the way the melody could sound so fresh and exciting, going to places you wouldn’t expect it to go, while still being strongly anchored in a clear tonal system. That moment literally opened up a whole new perspective on musical ideas, in a way very few musical works have ever since.

Years of listening to as much Prokofiev as I could showed me that that single concerto was no fluke. When you become really familiar with a particular band’s style, you develop a bond with the records, the sound of the guitars, the particular inflections of certain riffs and hooks. Godspeed just sounds like Godspeed, 65 Days of Static just sounds like 65 Days of Static, and so on…You could try to put this intimate knowledge into words, but you’d be missing the easiest description: their music speaks for itself.

Prokofiev flirted with atonality as a student at the turn of the Century, but never really embraced it. He did however create a language that is extremely articulate and nuanced. He understood how texture can suggest sarcasm and irony to a particular scene in a way few composers did. Listen to the more lighthearted passages in Romeo and Juliet or his Love for Three Oranges: comedy is rarely so obvious in music.

As most composers of the first half of the Twentieth Century, Prokofiev was deeply affected by the atrocities of his time. His Fifth Symphony was hailed as the unofficial soundtrack to the end of World War II, as it celebrated the hard-fought victory of the Red Army against the Germans on the Russian Front, which would eventually lead to Hitler’s downfall in the East. Listen to the first movement (which you can download here) and it isn’t hard to imagine the state Prokofiev was in. A victory of this magnitude doesn’t come for free, and the music mourns the fallen as much as it celebrates their courage.

Much like his friend Shostakovitch, Prokofiev was a witness of the Twentieth Century, through its achievements, its victories but also its struggles and its losses. Both composers enjoyed relative freedom from the Communist Party doctrines on cultural productions, while remaining attached to their native land. They enjoyed tremendous success in the West, but in their hearts, they remained Russian to the end.

Joseph Stalin died on March 5th, 1953. In a rigid regime like the one he helped creating, the death of the leader was an unprecedented national event, followed by days of mourning. The country literally stopped, and Moscow was at a standstill during the whole week leading up to his funeral. Deaths like these only happen a few times in a Century.
Oddly enough, Prokofiev died the same day, in the same city.

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Among Prokofiev’s five piano concertos, I find his first one to be the most interesting, in a way. It clearly sounds like the product of a young mind, brash, bold and tentative at the same time. While not the most popular of his works, there are moments of ecstatic beauty in this relatively short concerto. It is a technically demanding piece, which displays Prokofiev’s own pianistic skills, but even as a student showpiece, it already contains the main elements of his unique musical language.
This live version by Martha Argerich is formidable, as she always is.

1st movement

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2nd movement

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3rd movement

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Peter and the Wolf is one of the mainstays of music composed for children, and it’s easy to see why. Prokofiev thoroughly enjoyed the process and the objective of this commission piece, as he took only four days to complete the story and score.
As an introduction to the different voices and textures of an orchestra, Peter and the Wolf brilliantly puts the various sounds into a coherent narrative whole, which emphasizes the dramatic connotation we put on some instruments.
Let’s face it: could Darth Vader be represented by anything other than trombones and tubas?

The stop-motion Oscar winning version by Suzie Templeton takes some liberties with the original story, but she manages to recreate the fears of a child, in a way most child-friendly programs avoid. Genuine, cathartic fear, like a story by the Brothers Grimm. My children love it, and are both rightly elated and scared by it, as it should be.

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I never really know how to answer when people ask me where I’m from. There are memories of many places, houses and people that make up a rather disparate idea of what home really is for me. Leaving Sicily for France when I was 4 meant that I kept an idealized version of the place I was born, and it also meant that I grew up French, culturally speaking. Studying in London and falling in love in Providence brought me closer to an Anglo-saxon worldview, which I still find the most affinities with. Starting a family in Singapore taught me to overcome cultural differences and shed involuntary prejudices regarding Asian traditions, for which I am thankful.

So where’s home?

Of all places, I think I’m attached to my grandmother’s apartment most. This is the one house we still have, after all our relocations and real estate considerations. It hasn’t changed much: still the same furniture, the seaside area has been relatively spared from aggressive speculation, and all my grandfather’s instruments are still in perfect working condition. Every time I land in Palermo and we drive the 20 minute trip back I have this childlike sense of anticipation: I’ll open the front door and I’ll find my old collection of Mickey Mouse comic books, my toy cars, the Crumar organ and the miked-up folk guitar. And the smell. The apartment has a smell of seabreeze and clean linen that is forever etched in my olfactory memory. I don’t get to visit Sicily as often as I’d like to, but I know exactly what I’ll find every time I do. And that’s comforting.

My parents have been living near Turin since 1999. This is not where we come from, but it is home nonetheless. I love spending time with my brother and sister, and the time we spend together is precious. The village where we live is very quiet, and there isn’t much to do really. I’m not sure I could live here, but it’s a perfect place to take a break and get away from the stress of it all. It’s rather rural, too, and on a clear night you can see a lot more stars than you ever would in the city. The kids love it, in a way I suppose I must have loved Nonna’s Capaci apartment.

Of course, there was Singapore. You can’t just ignore 7 years of your life, being a father twice, starting a musical project and making friends through it. I’ve been meaning to write more about it since we’ve left, and I will once I settle down. But it wasn’t home, and wouldn’t have been for a few fundamental reasons. There is absolutely no bitterness in this, and in fact, I will cherish many memories from Asia, but no, it was not a place I could have really called home, as much as I tried.

So what now?

The new house looks great. It needs a bit of cleaning and refurbishing/furnishing, but we’re starting afresh. There is a park just across the road, and neighbors with kids of as many ethnic groups as you could think of.
I think we’re off to a good start.

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These pictures were taken around my parents’ place, at Lake Viverone, and in Genova.

[apologies for the lack of excerpt to download this week...I should be reunited with my CD collection once I reach Toronto!]

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I never really got into the Smiths. Maybe it was a variety of factors, but even when I started reading about how influential they had been to a whole lot of bands I was really into growing up, I still somehow failed to see the reason behind the reverence. Things would have been different, I’m sure, if I had been just a few years older and able to discover them right from the start. Or maybe, they would still have sounded just too…twee, perhaps? But being among a group of friends who were worshipping Morrissey in High School and College meant that I had to keep some thoughts for myself…

Until Southpaw Grammar. Now, there was something that Morrissey was doing right! Even though some of his ardent supporters were criticizing the album for being too heavy, textured, and prog (and God knows you don’t want to be labelled prog in certain indie circles…), his music was leading toward a new direction. And there was that formidably ominous opener, The teachers are afraid of the pupils, with its hypnotic orchestral sample backed by a simple tambourine loop. A simple motif, 4 notes in a rising/falling pattern, that keeps repeating throughout the song for over 11 minutes.

I wondered where that sample might have come from for the whole summer of ‘95. A few weeks later I stumbled upon Shostakovitch’s fifth.
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Artists often produce contrasting works about their native countries. Their ambiguities, their questionings and criticisms are met with some instinctual attachment to the land of their ancestors, the land they still love in spite of what History may have to say. They are no different from the other citizens, they just articulate the dichotomy more eloquently perhaps. And Shostakovitch’s entire body of work can be seen as a musical documentary on Soviet Russia, the rise and fall of Stalinism, and a tentative, timid opening to the West. He kept working on those themes throughout his life (another entry mentions this, if you missed it), but the Fifth Symphony marks a pivotal moment in his career.

After a few daring pieces in the early 1930s, Party members and dignitaries expressed their concern about Shostakovitch’s controversial musical language. This was a time of increased paranoia, cultural realignment, and state-sponsored purges. Artists, of course, were not spared, and Shostakovitch himself had been warned: he had to come up with something that would please the Party.
When the Fifth came out in 1937, it was an immediate critical and popular success. And yet, the opening sequence is hardly an optimistic or bombastic introduction in the vein of military marches, far from it. The motif that Morrissey sampled lies ambiguously between major and minor, an unresolved musical phrase that leaves the listener in a state of unease.
Perhaps the most obviously Soviet part of the symphony is its second movement. It is also its shortest act, and it is punctuated by a certain pungent irony, something that was shared by Prokofiev as well in most of his works. Hardly what you would call program music, or tone poem in dedication to the greatness of Stalin. But the leaders were happy with it.

What about the popular acclaim? The greatness of Shostakovitch lies in the fact that he offers no easy answers in his music: his ambiguity reflects the listener’s psyche, and what was hailed as one of the great musical works of Communist culture by some was also considered as a subtle criticism of Stalinism and its excesses by others. Listen to the mournful third movement and you might see it this way too. What are we celebrating here? Aren’t we rather mourning the countless victims of Stalin’s paranoia instead?

Perhaps the key to the success of Shostakovitch’s Fifth lies also in its accessibility. The melodic passages are clear and well-defined, the orchestration is powerful without being bombastic, and the narrative keeps going forward. Shostakovitch would eventually become more ambitious in his symphonic scope in the next two decades, but the blueprint is right here. A musical universe that is rich and complex, multifaceted and profound.

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The Fifth is arguably one of Shostakovitch’s most popular works. I grew up listening to the Bernstein version highlighted by the NPR clip, which had been approved by the composer himself. Interest in the Rusian composer has not waned over the years, and he is featured among every important conductor’s list of recordings. Sir Georg Solti and Yevgeny Mravinsky both released essential versions of most (if not all) his symphonies,
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The young LA Philharmonic conductor Gustavo Dudamel is going from strength to strength, and in the following videos you can easily see why. This was recorded in Italy with the Isreal Philharmonic Orchestra in 2006, when he was only 25.

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I’ve been wanting to resume the series for a while now, but life has this unknowable knack for getting in the way, and while I’ve been trying to work on new music as well, there simply didn’t seem to be time to devote to this project.
Now, as I transition from one continent to the next, and while what remains of my studio is slowly being shipped to Toronto, I take advantage of this break to start a new weekly program. No podcast for now, because, of course, my microphone is in the middle of the Atlantic as I’m writing this… but you’ll still find an excerpt to download, and some youtube clips to watch the whole piece. It’s quite amazing what you can find now if you search for a bit.

I’m starting with this Russian cycle for a few reasons. The composers that I’ve chosen represent a clear transition from one period to the next, as they take elements of the XIXth Century Romantics and inject a new dimension of modernity into their music. And as much as the early 1800s belonged to the Germans, the Russians really led music into the XXth Century.

I’ve also been giving some thought about the nationality of music. Where is music really from? Can you say that Mogwai is essentially Scottish, and Mono unmistakably Japanese? Music speaks of origins, currents are formed and languages are honed and refined, and few composers managed to express their attachment to their native land as comprehensively as the late 1800s Russians did. And first in line was Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov.
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Five young Russian composers came together in the early 1860s in Saint Petersburg. They were not professional musicians by trade, in fact, all of them still had day jobs and they retained them well into their established musical careers. But they bonded over a certain dissatisfaction with Western music and its emulation amongst the Elites of the Russian conservatories. They wanted their music to feel more genuine, to exude national feelings, to evoke Eastern landscapes rather than the imitation of a Western court.
Chief among them was Balakirev, but the youngest of the lot would eventually make one of the Russian Nationalists’ most enduring pieces.

Sheherazade is Rimsky-Korsakov’s best known work, and it displays all the aesthetic elements brought forward by The Five: use of oriental modes, increased presence of fourth and fifth intervals that eschew the clear distinction between major and minor, inclusion of folk and peasant tunes, and a strong, visual, musical language. Sheherazade is, for lack of better words, an Epic piece of symphonic music, a Fantasy based on middle Eastern legends and themes, the soundtrack to a film that we can all conjure up in the confines of our mind.

Not that Rimsky-Korsakov did away with every stylistic concept developed in Western music. Roughly speaking, Sheherazade is a typical Romantic symphony: 4 movements strongly articulated around 3 main themes, a slow and thunderous first and second movements, a lyrical and more playful third movement, and a majestic conclusion afterward.
However, the main symphonic structure is there to serve a purpose, a program. Each movement is a suggested reading from the 1001 nights: The voyages of Sindbad, the story of the Kalendar Prince, the story of a young Prince and a young Princess, and a final scene in Baghdad containing all the previous characters. And as such, the tonal color displayed by the orchestra ranges from the menacing to the suave, the sensual to the terrifying.

There are many melodic passages throughout the four movements which can be seen as a succession of solo instances, fleeting images reminiscent of the Orient and of forgotten lands. And Sheherazade, represented by a beautifully sensual violin motif, ties all the episodes together, weaving in and out of the musical narrative until the conclusion of her own story. After all, stories are the only thing keeping her alive, for fear of upsetting the Sultan and meeting the same tragic fate as all his previous wives.
The Sultan finally concedes to sparing her life after hearing her stories every evening for 1001 nights, and the finale of the fourth movement couldn’t have expressed this better: both musical themes meet and end the piece on a quiet, peaceful, major chord.

It’s easy to see how a work like this paved the ground for the next generation of musicians: Debussy, Ravel, Shostakovich and Prokofiev all professed a huge debt to Rimsky-Korsakov and his use of texture and harmony, for integrating folk tunes and odd modal schemes into a musical grammar that was becoming too stifling for innovation.
But his was an innovation that never sacrificed melody, feelings, or accessibility. Through his brand of Russian nationalism, Rimsky-Korsakov simply combined the best of both Worlds.

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Sheherazade has remained a consistently popular work, and the list of good recordings is quite exhaustive. I grew up listening to the Karajan version, and you can sample its first movement in this post (follow the link at the top). Some critics dislike the slightly slower tempo and the overarching solemn tone of the orchestra, but I have a hard time getting used to a more sprightly version! Besides, there is something genuinely terrifying about a Sultan who will execute you if you can’t manage to tell him a good story every night.
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The Dutch conductor Arthur Arnold has a version with the Moscow Philharmonic on Youtube. The cuts between videos don’t correspond to the separation between movements, and it hampers the listening, but it’s always a joy to watch an orchestra working its magic. Enjoy:

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The past few days have been a blur: packing the house for the relocation company, getting 51 boxes to fit into a 280 cubic-feet crate, selling the rest of our stuff away and donating the rest of the unsold items to families who would use an extra bed or a coffee table, cleaning the house for the landlord’s inspection, and generally sleeping a lot less than required.

It all feels good though, and I will write more about the process of moving, and what it means to us as a family, in a longer post.

We set up a bandcamp.com page for amberhaze, at long last. It seems that this platform has been quite successful in allowing customers to purchase cheaper and better sounding versions of what you can find on itunes or other major mp3 sites. I like the fact that you can choose your bitrate resolution, and the name-your-price option seems fair. As many artists have pointed out, making tons of money out of music is out of the question at this point, and if it means that greedy A&R’s and shortsighted majors will be out of business, then so be it. If it means that independently released artists and small labels have to work hard to promote their humble releases, then so be it. But it puts you, the listener, at an advantageous position: you get to fund our art directly, and though your contribution may be smaller in mere monetary considerations, we do keep more of your generous support in return. In a way, it’s a throwback to the medieval concept of the artist and the patron, and it’s not all that bad a deal. Au contraire.

Death in Venice was a track that we recorded during the album sessions. I started recording it at my parents’ house in Italy, and Nick put in the finishing touches during mixing.
The track is inspired by the eponymous short story by Thomas Mann, a reflection on ageing, the relevance of art and the difficulty to find inspiration around us. I can find a lot of resonance in Mann’s writing, even though he sometimes displays a penchant for affectation that I don’t always find easy to get into. And of course, this story is also complemented by the wonderful opera by Benjamin Britten, and the visual testament of Luchino Visconti.

The song is free with all downloads of the album. Hope you like it.

Errol asked me if I wanted to come down and hang out with Mike and Jared from Lymbyc Systym the night before the show. He wasn’t sure he could spend some time with them with all the commitments you find yourself submerged with when you’re trying to run a show for 3 different bands, So I was happy to play the artist liaison for the evening! In the end, it was still the four of us, and after a few beers we took the brother to Little India.
It was as though we had met before. I definitely had a feeling of deja-vu with Mike and Jared. They reminded me of some of the musician friends I had when we used to live in Providence. The type of people you can just start a conversation with, and you know it will just bounce off and evolve and morph into completely different topics. Case in point: veganism, Zen retreats, vintage keyboards and hoomecooked Italian food.
I find it very reassuring that musicians can reach a certain level of success, open for some of the most lauded current bands, and still remain totally unfazed about the whole media circus or the need to be in every hipster’s good books. More than anything, I think it just sums up the proverbial lesson: keep doing what you love, and something good will come out of it. Which were pretty much our parting words for the night!

The gig at Homeclub was great. Maybe it was because I knew it was going to be my last in Singapore, but it felt liberating. Playing by yourself and looping your own sounds can be daunting at times, and if you make a mistake there is no simple way to rectify it smoothly, which happens on occasion. But all loops were looped exactly when they needed to, the balance was just right, and it felt good to say goodbye with some songs that some in the audience have grown familiar with.

I did play a new cover, and that’s what you can hear in this blog. “Hunted by a freak” is one of my favourite tracks by Mogwai, and I only played it once before on the grand piano. This version is closer to the original I suppose, and at the same time it shows the direction some of my new tracks are taking.
I just realised how much I love playing and recording covers. Maybe I should start a record club too? hmm…

Lymbyc Systym were up next. And it’s amazing how full the keyboards/drums setup can sound. Plug a Rhodes and a Clavinet into a Vox and Ampeg, and you’ve got your walls of guitars and pounding basses at your fingertips. The Microkorg is just the icing on the cake.
Their brand of instrumental music is unmistakably American, in a Keith Jarrett kind of way. The sense of openness in their melodies, the interplay between the Rhodes and the drumming: never overdoing it, but never minimalistic either. This is why I’ve come to like North American bands more than their European counterparts. There is no false sense of irony, no existentialist angst looming every four bars. The music is honest, simple and beautiful. And ultimately, it stays with you much longer.

LITE were many things, but above all, they were precise. And as much as Lymbyc Systym could be the perfect soundtrack to a roadtrip in Arizona, LITE feels like walking down Shibuya or crossing platforms in Shinjuku. Their musicianship is incredible, from the odd-time signatures to the sudden outbursts of guitars and motorik bass. You know the feeling you have when your CD is skipping and you find it oddly fascinating? LITE can do that, live.
The crowd clearly came for them, too. And it was great to finally see a lot of reaction from the audience. This is something I never really got used to here, so for once seeing people loosening up and pushing towards the front was refreshing.

We hung out some more after the show, and Mike told me more about his adventures touring in small Italian towns and drumming for other bands. He also seemed to be quite amused by the fact that the kids are into music, and I could see the parallels between Luca and Dante and the Bell brothers. Luca and Mike, the older brothers, are both more extroverted and generally louder, and all you have to do is sit back and enjoy their stories. Dante and Jared are more mellow, and that’s why the dynamics work: it’s all in the balance.

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Mike summed up his musical philosophy this way: you’ve gotta play every show like it’s your last, or like a 6-year-old would. But with more control.
I couldn’t agree more. And as Luca and Dante grow up in a more receptive place for kids to play, experiment, fail and pick themselves up again, I’ll make sure to remind them.

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There will be more posts before I leave, but I really want to thank Errol and Lesley for believing in music, and making things happen.
Live band photos courtesy of Thomas Tan. Truly a devoted music lover and an amazing photographer.

I’ve been thinking about having a “farewell” show of sorts. A few bands have been splitting up, moving on, or simply bowing out lately here, and there have been a series of last gigs around. So, for a while, I thought it would have been a good way to go. But over the past two weeks, I realised that a farewell show would actually not make sense. At all.
I’m not quitting. I’m not going on indefinite hiatus. I am going to have to slow down the recording of new material until the Fall and we settle in Toronto, but this is only momentary. And this is not farewell.

I am playing one last show in Singapore before I leave though. KittyWu are having Lymbyc Systym and LITE over at HOMEclub next week, and I’m really excited to be opening for them. It’s probably going to be the last time I’ll play songs from the album the way I’ve been playing them for a while, before I start working on new sounds and new live concepts over the Fall and into next year. There are new ideas I’d like to explore, and new tracks I’ve been working on, but it’s all in progress for now.

So this is not farewell. It’s just goodbye, for now, to Singapore. Come down and have a beer and hang out with these two awesome bands next week!

Friday 02 July 2010
Doors open 7:30 PM
Early bird: $35. At the door: $40.

Tickets are available here
Payment details are on the site.
Follow the Facebook event here.

Click on the song to listen
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I read something quite disconcerting this morning on Repubblica
A monthly magazine, usually more prone to featuring the hot chick of the month in bikini or (preferably for its predominantly male readership) topless and beyond, is going to feature a cover showing Roberto Saviano at the morgue, complete with toe tag. According to the magazine, this photoshopped image represents what Saviano’s enemies wish could happen, and the list features not only the most notable Camorra bosses but also prominent government figures and influential bishops with ties to corrupt industrialists and the like.

I’m not sure this is the way to go, even if you’re trying to make a point. Saviano is a courageous man who is forced to live under constant protection, for the simple fact of exposing the way of the Neapolitan syndicates and how they control the whole region, and beyond. For this, which he considers his duty to inform, Saviano is a wanted man, unable to go get a coffee by himself, meet his fans casually, let alone have a relationship. He is a wanted man, but he is not a dead man. And neither does he want to be.

If you have ever seen him on TV, giving a speech, reading from his book or from other courageous journalists whom he admires, you’d be hard pressed to think of someone who feels more alive than him.

A few months ago, I started this track, in honour of him. And unlike the monthly magazine, it is not a fake eulogy, or a shock tactic to draw attention. It’s just my humble appreciation of a man who believes in something bigger than him, in a time when we are all too easily looking the other way. It takes more than courage to write like he does. It makes me sad, angry and ashamed to see how other journalists and TV personalities from Silvio Berlusconi’s channels are branding him an opportunist and, for lack of better words, a “media whore”. How can you look yourself in the mirror? Would you also insult Anna Politkovskaya’s death by the same token?
“Saviano”, this track in progress, features samples taken from a talk show. I am not including them here, because, well, I don’t own them yet! But if you do understand Italian, These snippets make a lot more sense than the instrumental version you have here. I hope you like it though.

Coraggio, Roberto.

This is definitely a period of transition.

We are two months away from our big move to Toronto, and as much as we want to believe there are still 8 weeks left to departure, the number of errands and chores is staggering: preemptive healthchecks, various visa applications, and other logistical details which remind me just how great J is at those things, and how I probably should learn a little from her…
The destination sure looks promising, the journey less so. I know we are going to be very happy in Canada, for us and for the kids, but with each passing week, I also realise how much I will miss the friends I’ve made in the past seven years. I started amberhaze here, and although the internet makes geography almost irrelevant to a certain extent, you just can’t scrap three years that easily and uproot everything without a tinge of wistfulness.

Three years. I was recording my first EP when Dante was born, and he just turned three last weekend. Having children has been both the scariest and most beautiful thing that has ever happened to me: they give you a reason to fight for what you stand for, look at the bright side and believe that you can make a difference. And that’s a scary thought.

The responsibility is unlike anything else I’ve experienced, and no career or job prospects could ever come close to what is at stake in seeing your kids grow, form personalities of their own, laugh, play and think for themselves. Sometimes I wonder what other parents here must think of us, the way we choose to raise our children, and there again, I realise that Toronto would probably be a better fit for all of us. And Luca and Dante especially.

Errol and Lesley got married (again!) last week, and they finally threw their Rollopoloosley, which is going to be a tough act to follow for any couple who will want to throw an unusual wedding party. Fort Canning, amazing bands, fireworks, bouncy castle… how can you compete?!?
Errol had a little surprise in mind for Lesley. The fact that we managed to keep it a secret until the evening itself is a little miracle! We prepared a cover of Pressure Suit by Aqualung, which is very special to the two of them, and Errol practiced on my “karaoke” version anytime he would be on his own…which means a lot of singing stuck in traffic I suppose!
We got on stage and no one had an idea of what was going to happen, and Errol had the lyrics written on a piece of paper. Taking into account the overall state of inebriation I’d say we did ok. But mostly, I was honored to be a part of something so sweet, romantic and heartfelt as this little secret surprise song.

The party is probably one of the many we will have before we leave. And as much as this is a period of transition, these friendships are our Constant.