Name: Lorenzo Setti aka ATŌMI
Occupation: Composer, drummer, sound artist
Nationality: Italian
Recent release: ATŌMI's expansive full-length Little Floating Oracles, mastered by Lawrence English and featuring Laura Masotto and Giulia Bernardi, is out via Lady Blunt.

[Read our Lawrence English interview]
[Read our Lawrence English interview about sound]
[Read our Laura Masotto interview]
[Read our Laura Masotto interview about the Mediterranean Refugee Crisis]

If you enjoyed these thoughts by ATŌMI and would like to find out more about his work, visit his official website. He is also on Instagram, and Facebook.

To keep reading, head over to our interview with ATŌMI about his personal history in sound or his thoughts about sound in general.



The idea of acoustic ecology has drawn a lot of attention to the question of how much we are affected by the sound surrounding us. What's your take on this and on acoustic ecology as a movement in general?  

Ecoacoustics is a huge topic to cover with all its subcategories and contemporary speculations, something that is very interesting and inspiring for me. Driving the answer to the question in a slightly different direction, I would like to emphasize the topic of the impact on the ecosystem related to the media we use to “consume” music.

The term “consume” itself brings our imagination directly to something that is related to mass production, closer to quantity instead of quality, and personally also to an intensive exploitation of nature understood as both environment and resources.

If we try to widen our vision we can clearly see the problem of non-recyclability and non-sustainability of the music industry, from tours to instruments production, passing through the raw material used to manufacture physical and digital media, devices and components.

Something that I’m currently focusing on is my interest to find alternatives to  common physical media which would let people listen to music without polluting the environment as we are used to with vinyl, cassette, CD and also hard drives.

At first, we had the invention of the 78” vinyl. Made of shellac, it took millions of insects and numerous hectares of land to produce at least one kilogram of this resin, all of which can predictably lead to the use of pesticides and the death of the trees that harbor these insects. Then, the music industry moved to PVC / plastic used to produce 33”/45”, CDs and cassettes.

PVC is a synthetic polymer known as polyvinyl chloride and derived from ethylene, a petrochemical product, led the music industry to enter into profitable agreements with the petrochemical industry (even if PVC can be recycled, this does not seem to be cost-effective) leading to the huge problem of database farms.

There are already several alternatives available, like the use of bamboo or recycled plastic, wood, non-toxic silicone and organic cotton, but I’m not here to find solutions through a brief answer but to raise the awareness of musicians which are the first to get trapped in this mostly unknown and hidden petrol-capitalistic reality and then of course also of businessmen / women not only from major record labels but even more from the indie ones and the art industry in general.

I have been thinking a lot about this topic over the past months and hopefully we will have the chance to see the result of some weird ideas on my next releases.

From the concept of Nada Brahma to "In the Beginning was the Word", many spiritual traditions have regarded sound as the basis of the world. Regardless of whether you're taking a scientific or spiritual angle, what is your own take on the idea of a harmony of the spheres and sound as the foundational element of existence?

I've been researching this topic for years now. My debut EP ARMØNIA, first of a trilogy, is the first step in this direction.



I’ve tried to go deeper into the interconnection between philosophies, religions, science (the modern time religion) and all that knowledge most often passed down orally, related one another by symbolism and frequencies.

Starting from the knowledge that “everything is connected”, trying to always compare the macro with the micro, following the second hermetic principle of correspondence: “As above, so below; as below, so above. As within, so without; as without, so within”. The Kybalion, every spiritual and philosophical symbology seems to relate to one another and cultures, even existing in different times and places, are clearly interwoven with each other.

My research is strongly influenced by Pythagoras of Samos and of course by all the post-Pythagoreans, even if none of his scriptures have come down to us, probably because, as I said before, he passed on his knowledge only orally. His wide-ranging influences, from Egypt to Arabia and Greece, brought to Western Europe the ancient knowledge of the "harmony of the spheres," harmonic relationships and many other understandings.

Reading and researching on: Pythagoras, Kepler, Plato, Aristotle, Filolao, Galileo Galilei, Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Diogene Laerzio, Archimede, just to name a few, brought me to consider this reality as a scale of vibrating things. Everything is vibrating at different and peculiar rate, our senses are calibrated to recognize and decode just a few of these vibrations; for example, speaking in a scientific way, from 20hz to 20khz, we hear the vibration related to sound and from 400 to 790 terahertz we perceive the visible spectrum.

I don’t think that sound is the foundational element of existence. Rather, I believe that the widened spectrum of vibration, that also includes sound, is the key element of the material and immaterial plane of existence.

In the end, closing my brief parenthesis on this very inspiring and huge topic, I believe that we all should be aware of the power of vibrations, expressed as words / sounds as well as symbols / colors, because knowing how to use them but also to filter or to protect ourselves from these tools, can bring us to a certain state of perception as well as shaping our “reality”.

Vibration is energy, energy is power.