Name: SPIME.IM
Members: Davide Tomat, Gabriele Ottino, Matteo Marson, Marco Casolati
Interviewees: Davide Tomat, Gabriele Ottino
Nationality: Italian
Current release: SPIME.IM's Grey Line is out via -OUS.
Recommendations:
Davide: I’d like recommend a book. New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future by James Bridle.
Gabriele: I will go with NONOSEKNOWS by Mika Rottenberg or any of her exhibitions.

If you enjoyed this SPIME.IM interview and would like to stay up to date with the collective and their music, visit their official homepage. They are also on Instagram, Facebook, and twitter.



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?

Davide: Nice, I mostly imagine music as shapes and colors too. To me, music has always been about abstract images, interwoven with some nature, animals and human characteristics.

I love to listen to and play music with my eyes closed, but as a producer, I need to alienate myself in the process, while I'm looking at the monitor. So basically, my eyes are cut off when I deal with music.

For us, body listening is the central aspect of the way we listen to music. When we produce and when we perform, we mostly concentrate on the body feeling, that’s why we work with a lot on sub frequencies.

Being an audiovisual project, it’s important to deal with all three aspects of perception: ears, eyes and body.

What were your very first steps in music like and how would you rate the gains made through experience - can one train/learn being an artist?

Davide: My very first step was my exposure to a wide range of music on a daily basis in my childhood, because of my father's record collection. Then, there was the decision to play my father’s guitar and discover musicians that created songs that spoke to me and were similar to the music I imagined at the time. They helped me to believe that I could follow my passion. This was followed by my first synthesizers, the first concert, the first studio, the first records and so on, like everybody’s steps in music.

What is really important is the joy, the love and the passion that needs to be put into experimenting, discovering and playing with music every day. That really helps in shaping a personal approach, feeling and taste.

If there's really a way to train and learn being an artist, well, I think, it is't more about perception of what surrounds us, by trying to develop empathy in relation to the human and non human world.

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?

Davide: I didn't know this, but it doesn't surprise me. Sometimes, half joking, I say that basically I haven't changed too much from when I was 16.

That age was the time when I deeply fell in love with sounds and music, the age when I decided that I needed to create music in my life. I felt that music could set me free, that music was the only way for me to feel free, to keep, feed, evolve and protect my deep emotions in life and prevent the system from engulfing me.

That feeling has never changed and I'm still living music as a freedom of choice and effort.

What, would you say, are the key ideas behind your approach to music and what motivates you to create?

Davide: This could sound big, but I think most comes from the deep feeling well explained by Spinoza as "man's finitude is based on the infinite". The immense sadness we all feel, but prefer not to recognize, as Morton says “beauty is death in small doses”.

That feeling is what motivates us to create, that noise that never stops inside, that uncontainable and elusive sense of implosive beauty, that constant distance from the present, that “paranoia which is a condition of possibility of empathy”.

To quote a question by the great Bruce Duffie: When you come up with a musical idea, have you created the idea or have you discovered the idea?

Davide: From an egocentric point of view we all could say “I had an idea.” But the more I grow up the more I understand that “we discover ideas”.I agree with those who say that you’d better work on music everyday, because if an idea emerges, you’ll be ready to catch it. At the same time, creating and discovering things stand in a tricky relation to each other.

In a way, I seem to perceive an extended awareness, including towards the human-human and the nonhuman, plants, things, animals, the earth, planets, stars and everything the universe is made of. So sometimes it becomes difficult to recognise whether we are discovering something that is already there or if this consciousness is creating something in that precise moment because it is in tune with the others.

Gabriele: To me it is both, executed in the way we create devices that help us explore ideas. Every piece of music and visual concept is a different experiment in technique with the same essence in the substance.

Paul Simon said “the way that I listen to my own records is not for the chords or the lyrics - my first impression is of the overall sound.” What's your own take on that and how would you define your personal sound?

Davide: I totally agree with Paul Simon regarding the first impression of the overall sound.That is why I keep all the steps of the tracks I’m working on and go back to them often. It helps me understand whether I’m staying true to the first pure core during the compositional process, or whether I’ve lost it. That is also why I don’t really care about how the track is played, in terms of good quality of sound and canons of listening.

Don’t get me wrong, I really love tracks that sound very very very good, because they transport you into their space. But mostly I love tracks that sound special, different, that bring you to a different place, maybe a place you have never been before.

So the big deal for me is to try to keep my personal sound at a level that enables anyone to enter my world, but at the same time my world needs to be there, to “sound” personal and evident.

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”?

Davide: With Spime.im, we use a lot of non-human sound sources to create our sounds, by processing them with resonant filters, fft filters, granulators and vocoders. We have also made an audiovisual installation in which the audience was able to upload video content, which we processed in real time.

As Italians, we are all influenced by the Futurismo current, Luigi Russolo and the "Intonarumori". Even if Futurismo has been historically lumped together with Fascism, artistically it was a totally a forward thinking movement together with Minimalismo on one side, John Cage on the other, with the Studio di Fonologia in Milan, with Pierre Schaeffer, Stockhausen, Xenakis and all their disciples who helped humans to recognise music everywhere. Non-human sounds are maybe the reason why humans started making sounds.

Personally, on one of my birthdays, I decided to stay out in my city for 24 hours, and record 24 hours of sound material in the most intimate places to me. I had wanted to do a record using only those sounds, which I never completed besides some tracks.

But after that I kept working with non-human sounds to create music a lot.

From very deep/high/loud/quiet sounds to very long/short/simple/complex compositions - are there extremes in music you feel drawn to and what response do they elicit?

Davide: I am actually very attracted to extremes in music, in terms of sound, dynamics and emotions.

Could you describe your creative process on the basis of one of your pieces, live performances or albums that's particularly dear to you, please?

Davide: Concerning our new album Grey Line, which was released in September, an interesting creative process was the creation of “Crystal,” the track that features Stina Fors.



Mostly, SPIME.IM tracks are made through a well defined process. I had worked with Stina for a theater piece, the contemporary female transposition of Frankenstein by the director Filippo Andreatta. During rehearsals, I had created a patch with Ableton Live and M4L tools that was creating rhythmic patterns out of live vocals in real time. We didn't go for that in the theater piece, but the result was quite interesting and so we adapted it for the new SPIME.IM album.

We wrote a text by feeding chatGPT with contemporary concepts about capitalism and communism and then recorded Stina reading it. We then updated the patch and fed it with Stinas voice recordings. We then did some impro-session looping and delaying her voice to interact with random drums sounds and random divisions to create tons of rhythmical patterns. We chose the best parts and the track was done.

Do you conduct “experiments” or make use of scientific insights when you're making music?

Davide: I always blame myself for forgetting how I did everything I did. Everytime I start something new, I find myself in front of a blank sheet. I could definitely find the energy to dive into my previous work and find out how I did something, but I prefer to use that energy to panic and go crazy trying to find a (maybe new) way to do something that I have in my mind at that moment.

That is probability because of my propensity to do experiments and discover new paths, especially during the very first step of the creation process. The scientific insights usually come later, when the core of the track is defined, and I start working on it in detail. Here, I force myself to remember previous processes that had helped me to do something specific that I have in mind.

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?

Davide: Music is an everyday thing for me. It’s a daily ritual. That is why I don't like to go on holidays, because I must give up my daily ritual.

With such a ritual, you are forced to deal with yourself every day, with all the facets of your personality, the obvious ones but also the hidden ones.

That, if done in a propositive and evolving way, gives you the choice to discover and understand yourself better every day, also in relation to the outside world.

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?

Davide: I think it’s not so different, that is why I prefer to have breakfast, lunch, dinner, coffee and tea outside if I can. Someone else will take the burden to do it properly.

I can’t take “mundane” activities as seriously as I take “making music”, otherwise I wouldn't have any time to do the things I actually do.

Fortunately, I never had the feeling that I could express what I express with music through other means.

Every time I listen to "Albedo 0.39" by Vangelis, I choke up. But the lyrics are made up of nothing but numbers and values. Do you, too, have a song or piece of music that affects you in a way that you can't explain?

Gabriele: There is a particular part of a song from the last album Zero that, every time I play it live, gives me a slight burning sensation in my stomach and warms my body. It's in “Zero19” when, halfway through the song, there's an abrupt change, and it starts this crescendo that leads to a series of harmonic shifts that feel like I'm hearing them for the first time every time.



It's strongly disorienting but pleasant at the same time.

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

Davide: Wow that is tough. Personally, I would love a recession of hype in music. Nowadays brands rule the music. Hype and business dynamics really fucked up the music system, and now the best thing an artist can do (economically thinking) is to be tied up with a good brand.

The artist’s role as a free thinker is almost lost, since every kind of brand has way more power. Mainstream music to me is totally fucked up, and the only resistence to the system is in the underground field.