Name: Marco Marzuoli and Marco Mazzei
Nationality: Italian
Occupation: Musician
Current Release: Platonic Tales on Hidden Harmony Recordings
Recommendations: 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea by Jules Verne / Marco 1: Nostalghia by Andrej Tarkovskij / Marco 2: The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel

If you enjoyed this interview with Jules Archive, keep up to date with their releases on social media, YouTube and SoundCloud.

When I listen to music, I see shapes, objects and colours. What happens in your body when you're listening? Do you listen with your eyes open or closed?

It all depends on the circumstances. However, if we try to have a deep listening while walking around the city, it is inevitable to keep our eyes open to avoid ending up under a car or hitting a pole.

In case there is the possibility of letting ourselves go to the emotions, the reactions can vary depending on the song we are listening to:
- Marco 1: I remain still.
- Marco 2: I stand up, raise my arms and breathe deeply.

As much as every kind of music has its appeal, entering new worlds and escapism through music have always exerted the strongest pull on me. What do you think you are drawn to most when it comes to listening to and creating music?

As can be seen from our works, escapism is an essential part. It’s no coincidence that our project has very strong references to the imaginary worlds of Jules Verne.
Before deciding to compose music together, we asked ourselves what we needed and what was lacking in the world of music today: escapism, the pacification of our souls in imaginative worlds, was a prompt answer.
However, this choice of ours must not exclude all the other purposes that music can have.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience?

Marco 1: I have always loved fantasizing, since I was very young, but I came to music quite late, during adolescence. Since I have always been technically denied on a performative level, the fact that I have a printed album that I like as much as "Platonic Tales" can only make me proud of my progress.
Marco 2: I started as a child playing with an old piano at my grandmother's house. As time passed, acquiring new knowledge, I became an arranger. This new album projects me into a more complete realm, where music (although fundamental) is only one aspect of an imaginary world. In summary, my progress has been constant, but exponential, taking me from extremely intimate realities to universes to explore.

According to scientific studies, we make our deepest and most incisive musical experiences between the ages of 13-16. What did music mean to you at that age and what’s changed since then?

Marco 1: From that period of my life a musical journey began, that went through many phases. Initially, I listened to music recommended by friends, family and TV channels like MTV (90s). As time passed, I started exploring more complex and marginal musical genres. Now, it seems I’m returning to rediscover my first musical experiences, closing a cycle of exploring the vastness of music in all its forms.
Marco 2: I started listening to music without worrying about its intrinsic value, but over time I developed an appreciation for complex musical works. At the moment, I tend not to listen to much, preferring local radio stations, that mainly promote popular music and muzak. Been even just with casual listening, I come across true works of musical art.

How would you describe your own relationship with your instrument, tools or equipment?

For us musical instruments are not performance instruments, but useful tools for musical composition and manipulation.
In this sense, therefore, we do not consider ourselves musicians in the more traditional meaning.

Where does the impulse to create something come from for you? What role do often-quoted sources of inspiration like dreams, other forms of art, personal relationships, politics etc play?

Before we create music, a sort of analytical research takes place between us where we look for a phenomenological intuition to inspire us.
It doesn't mean that there isn't a creative and spontaneous musical moment, but it’s often subordinate to a predestined idea we have to make a certain kind of music, that we feel is necessary.

Are you acting out parts of your personality in your music which you couldn't or wouldn't in your daily life? If so, which are these? What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music?

We consider ourselves very similar in artistic and daily life.
The thing we have in common is the reduced capacity for social mediation so we are very explicit and sincere.
In music, we can allow ourselves to be more vulnerable.

If music is a language, what can we communicate with it? How do you deal with misunderstandings?

A topic I've thought about a lot.
Art is a language and therefore a set of conventional codes, but the same art also allows us to create a personal language without codes.
We can create our own grammar to say what we want, how we want, without straying one iota from the essence and core of our inner idea.
If you want to make an ultra-radical personal album, the linguistic canons must be eliminated.
But if you have an urgent need to communicate your artistic message to many, then you have to use the most effective and understandable language (codes) possible.

Making music, in the beginning, is often playful and about discovery. How do you retain a sense of playfulness and how do you still draw surprises from tools, approaches and musical forms you may be very familiar with?

Quoting Brian Eno: "Children learn through play, adults play with art".

Sound, song, and rhythm are all around us, from animal noises to the waves of the ocean. What, if any, are some of the most moving experiences you've had with these non-human-made sounds? In how far would you describe them as “musical”?

Living in a rural environment, the stimuli are so constant that it is practically impossible to remember and list them all.
According to Wikipedia: "Music is an art form consisting of sound and silence, expressed through time."...so the sounds of nature are a fundamental part of the music word.

There seems to be an increasing trend to capture music in algorithms, and data. But already at the time of Plato, arithmetic, geometry, and music were considered closely connected. How do you see that connection yourself? What aspects of music do you feel can be captured through numbers, and which can not?

Musical or rhythmic patterns, and the mathematical nature of music, do not particularly inspire us and we don’t consider them close to our compositional canons. For us, music is the expression of an instinctive and non-codified language, which sometimes, needs to make itself readable (using a sharable grammar, which could be mathematics) to communicate with the listeners in the most effective and crystal-clear way.

How does the way you make music reflect the way you live your life? Can we learn lessons about life by understanding music on a deeper level?

The music we compose draws inspiration from our experiences and life itself. Music and art are the only contexts, together with nature (although not always), in which we can discover fully harmonious landscapes, where everything contributes to something bigger, perfect and more orderly than the disorder of daily life. 
Music therefore, in its creation of landscapes, helps us to understand the elements of reality, which we then find organised in the final composition.

We can surround us with sound every second of the day. The great pianist Glenn Gould even considered this the ultimate delight. How do you see that yourself and what importance does silence hold?

Silence is not absolute, but there are more rarefied conditions in which softness (which is usually suffocated by the multitude of sounds) emerge.

"Never again will such moments be possible for me. But of late, I have been increasingly able to catch, if I listen attentively, the sound of the sobs which I had the strength to control in my father's presence and which broke out only when I found myself with Mamma. In reality, their echo has never ceased; and it is only because life is now growing more and more quiet round me that I hear them anew, like those convent bells which are so effectively drowned during the day by the houses of the street that one would suppose them to have stopped, until they ring out again through the silent evening air."

— Marcel Proust, p.49 Swann's Way (1913)

Do you feel as though writing or performing a piece of music is inherently different from something like making a great cup of coffee? What do you express through music that you couldn't or wouldn't in more 'mundane' tasks?

There isn't much difference between making coffee and creating music. You just need to follow or not follow a "method".
It is an almost Zen practice. Since the coffee ritual is made up of various, basic and small actions, the simple initial thought of preparing it, is already part of the "experience of the coffee" itself.
The concept of "mundane" is relative, and strictly connected to the method itself.

If you could make a wish for the future – what are developments in music you would like to see and hear?

Marco 1: The end of the music resigned to existence as it is imposed on us, which is invading our record market with thousands of albums devoid of visionary enthusiasm, luminous energy and the need to drive towards the future.
Marco 2:  A greater compositional sincerity in music, with less dependence on the market.