Part 2

Take us through a day in your life, from a possible morning routine through to your work, please.

I have been absent from my routine for the last 3 months now since I started my masters in Milan, but I am still based in Berlin trying to juggle work, studio and studies. I'll take you through an ideal pleasant day, that happened not too long ago.

I woke up around 9am and religiously played / cuddled with my dog - he has a silly morning routine. I took him for a walk and thought to myself "why do I live in such a cold city?", that thought is always present sadly. I came back home, had a coffee and breakfast (I mix up cereal and coffee in the same bowl too) and tidied up the house a bit otherwise I can't really start my day. When I have a bit of time, I like to sit by the kitchen window and read a book.

I went to my studio where I started replying to a few emails and got a really nice invitation to work on a website (I have a side web designer wannabe version of me). I had two students coming over for creative mentoring sessions, which always reminds me that I very much like to do this, to meet people, exchange ideas and help them to get their projects going and progressing. When they left, I had my little time with music.

I find it hard to work on music in the morning, knowing I still have the whole day ahead of me. I came back home and passed by the market for some groceries - wine is always on the list. Had a nice dinner with my partner.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of a piece, live performance or album that's particularly dear to you, please?

All my released albums were a sort of collection of tracks that shared a certain creative process or workflow in that period.

On the upcoming album there were a lot of samples processed in the GR-1, from piano loops to one-shot percussion. I usually spent whole afternoons just playing with the GR-1, recording everything, to then listen to it back and maybe record a bit more. One of the tracks was a long take on the GR-1 looped, with a free improv on bass, which was very fun and emotional at the same time.

From these long recordings (we're talking around 1,5 hour long) I try to search for pieces that resonate, like maybe something I could loop over and just that already locks me in. Or a very short percussion pattern that alone dictates a certain groove. I like to find these moments and then do a bit of 'puzzle playing' on composition, layering other elements on top as ideas start to come forward.

There was a time when I wanted to be faster in completing my projects, but when the main idea isn't there yet, it just isn't and you can't rush it. I find myself actually enjoying letting it take longer, something that maturates and then maybe a stronger idea appears.

Listening can be both a solitary and a communal activity. Likewise, creating music can be private or collaborative. Can you talk about your preferences in this regard and how these constellations influence creative results?

I haven't directly collaborated with many artists yet, but I would love to! I think making music alone has this introspective value for me, but after the last three albums I feel like the next one I would like to make it a big collaborative piece, with different instrumentalists, so that I could develop more in a compositional level.

I think that, especially in electronic music, artists are being pushed to try to occupy all the different roles of the process. And that hinders exchange in my opinion. Sure, a plugin could help you to get a nice melody on and so your melody task is done, but getting a friend who is a pianist to come and record that with you feels much more exciting.

I like to adventure myself on different acoustic instruments, like guitar, bass or drums. And even not playing that great, everytime I jammed with friends on casual occasions was just so much fun. Sharing that same synced space in time. And I would like to experience that on stage too.

How do your work and your creativity relate to the world and what is the role of music in society?

Without repeating myself too much on the psychology topic (I know that I've been too excited now studying it) I think my music work is an analogy of me trying to find my place in this world. Finding my place while bringing that exploration of who I am with me in the process.

While music brings us together through the shared emotions we experience when we listen to music in community, and support actions that we want to take in life and concretize in the real world, I think music is also here to help us process feelings and thoughts, to support those moments when we need at least something to understand us, and to put a 'name' on things we can barely grasp the reality of. I pretty much agree with that saying, that nothing in nature happens without serving evolution.

I like the idea of having my work and my creativity being in service for society, like, if my work helps me, I hope that it can as well help others. I think being an artist nowadays can be taken too much on an individualistic path of achievement obsession, just like any other career, and hopefully we can do better than that.

Art can be a way of dealing with the big topics in life: Life, loss, death, love, pain, and many more. In which way and on which occasions has music – both your own or that of others - contributed to your understanding of these questions?

On a personal note, music has helped me in dealing with loneliness and feeling misunderstood. Besides being the only thing around that translates in sound with 100% accuracy your state-of-being in a particular moment, like a big consolation hug, when I listen to or make music, it feels like it's planting a seed on my head, some food for thought for later.

And now studying Music Therapy (so I must admit I'm really enjoying these questions and I think these interviews deserve a 2-hour long podcast series) it blows my mind the crucial vital importante that music has in our lives, while being such an invisible thing.

I had the opportunity as well to teach a student that wanted to work through their grief in our mentoring sessions. Our experiences together marked me a lot and I take it dearly close to me now.

How do you see the connection between music and science and what can these two fields reveal about each other?

I have been taking music theory lessons lately and it's fascinating how, in a way, music is a language totally translatable into mathematics. But still, it gets easier to learn it when you start to associate imaginary ideas or feelings to it. As is science and, I guess, everything around us.

But at the same time, both music and science have these mystical, unexplainable elements to it, that we all share and that can support us in so many situations. Especially when in Music Therapy, reading about the history of the discipline and how it fought for scientific recognition.

It's funny, science (and sometimes music) is like this big entity that we all have to prove we are real enough for to be taken into consideration.

Creativity can reach many different corners of our lives. 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?

It's definitely different! I think it's because music is one of the few things that triggers so many parts of our brain at once.

I mean, as far as I remember, the studies say that our brain reacts just as if music was a drug. There are other activities that people express themselves, like cooking or pottery. But there is an expressive freedom to music like no other. And it's a constant exchange between playing and at the same time listening and instantly receiving back what we are putting out.

I feel like music is for me this ultimate place of expressing things and the sensory side of it is very rewarding. When doing mundane tasks I might be a very anxious person, to be neat and precise and do it right. So music-making feels like that place where I can allow myself to be anything but that.

Music is vibration in the air, captured by our ear drums. From your perspective as a creator and listener, do you have an explanation how it able to transmit such diverse and potentially deep messages?

I think we love to feel connected through our imaginary and symbolic senses.

Like when we watch a powerful movie, it is another universe with its own images and colours and emotions shared on that level. We've been exposed to our auditory senses since very early on in our lives, and we might not be aware but we've been collecting these auditory inputs, reframing and associating it with our emotions ever since. I feel like every one of us constructs their own unique inner soundscape, with completely different "sound-dictionaries", although culturally we share a lot of the same meanings together.

So it might be this beautiful consonant blend between the shared (listening to music from others) and recognizing something of us inside it that gives music such a potential of transmitting messages we feel deeply related to.