Part 1

Name: Matteo Liberatore aka Molto Ohm
Nationality: Italian
Occupation: Composer, guitarist, improviser, performer, sound artist
Recent release: Molto Ohm's debut album FEED is out March 21st 2025 via New Focus.
Recommendations on the topic of sound:
Noise / Music: A History by Paul Hegarty
Music 109: Notes on Experimental Music by Alvin Lucier

If you enjoyed this Matteo Liberatore interview and would like to stay up to date with his music, visit his official website. There is also a dedicated Molto Ohm page. 

For a deeper dive, read Matteo's thoughts on the importance of sound and noise for our wellbeing.

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?

When I listen to noise music or attend a rave, there are moments when the experience transcends listening and becomes purely physical. Consciousness is finally disengaged, and the body takes over. When this happens I often feel sheer excitement.

I occasionally host small listening parties at my apartment with friends. Listening to music with other like-minded people can make me feel so ecstatic that I can barely sit still. The same thing can happen when I go to live shows. Sometimes, the music is so good that I turn to my friends and we nod in shared awe.

I listen with my eyes open. I mostly meditate this way, too. When your mind is clear, objects and colors appear brighter, more vivid and ‘reality’ feels closer, more real. The act of seeing is directly influenced by how ‘present’ your mind is and I use it as a tool to assess my emotional state.

Reality often looks dim compared to the hyper-detailed brightness of 4K TV screens, but with practice, we can catch glimpses of that kind of vision ourselves. Lev Manovich suggests that digital, synthetic images are realistic representations of human vision in the future when it will be augmented by computer graphics and cleansed of noise.

I like to think of it differently: these digital images could be humanity’s attempt to replicate those fleeting moments of bliss we rarely experience in everyday life—moments of love, peace, or profound connection. They’re an effort to recreate the clarity and sharpness we’ve felt in our most alive and present states, which literally enhances our vision.

I remember reading a book about meditation years ago, and someone in the book mentioned how the tree outside their window looked greener after meditation. I thought it was an absurd statement until I experienced it myself.

How do listening with headphones and listening through a stereo system change your experience of sound and music?

When I’m listening to heady electronic music alone at home, I usually reach for headphones. They allow me to focus on the minutiae—the textures, the ambience, the layers of sound—on an almost atomic level. The electricity and artificiality of electronic sounds pair well with the isolated environment that headphones create. It feels like a solitary, personal experience.

However, there’s a lot you can miss with headphones. Sometimes, I get so absorbed in the details that I lose sight of the bigger picture; speakers are much better for that. They also open up the possibility of shared experiences, which, as I mentioned earlier, can be incredibly powerful.

Tell me about some of the albums or artists that you love specifically for their sound, please.

A few albums that stuck with me from the past 2-3 years:



The simplicity and directness of these two Alvin Lucier pieces is extraordinary, they say so much with so little. And the recording is immaculate.



aya’s debut album is incredible. The vibe, the compositions, the textures, the depth of the sounds.



Gerald Cleaver might be best known for his career as a top jazz drummer but this debut as electronic musician and composer floored me. The sound world he created is special.

[Read our Gerald Cleaver interview about modular synthesis]

Do you experience strong emotional responses towards certain sounds? If so, what kind of sounds are these and do you have an explanation about the reasons for these responses?

Absolutely. Sound, filtered through our brain, becomes memory, emotion.

To illustrate: the sound of a Yamaha DX7 electric piano patch, or its iconic bass patch, move me, likely because I was born in the ’80s. The sound of a choir gives me goosebumps. I grew up in Italy, my dad listening to Gregorian chants, a church choir in the distance on a Sunday morning, Pavarotti through the home speakers, the memory of a life I don’t live anymore.

In other words, it evokes nostalgia. Much of our emotional response to sound is rooted in nostalgia and memory. Would I like the DX7 piano patch if I didn’t have such strong unconscious memories of it? Would I have ever been drawn to that FM bass patch if Giorgio Moroder hadn’t composed “Take My Breath Away” in 1986? Probably not.

Sounds of nature, on the other hand, can evoke comforting feelings, dreams of escape, and intimacy with oneself. When I hear a plane overhead, I think of travel, freedom, and all the possibilities that come with it—a pleasant feeling, albeit one that’s probably been implanted in me by advertising. When I hear a moped down the street, I’m transported back to my teenage years, zipping around my small town in Abruzzo.

At this point, it’s hard to know if there’s any sound that isn’t laden with associations. I explore these themes in my project Molto Ohm, especially related to our modern sonic landscapes.

Apart from associations with memory and feeling, there’s another way to experience sound, one that aligns more with Zen and the work of Pauline Oliveros and John Cage.

When I do a meditation focused on sound, there are fleeting moments in which listening transforms into something else entirely—an immediate hearing, a complete, effortless awareness, as if sound bypasses the brain’s processing and reaches my body directly, existing beyond cultural conditioning, taste, expectation, memory, meaning.

In those rare instances (which sometimes reappear throughout the day), sounds, for lack of a better word, touch me. I feel them almost physically on my skin, poking me. I don’t hear their cultural value or what they’re meant to signify. They are just waves, hitting my body ever so gently. I don’t reach for them—they come to me.

The first few times this happened to me, I teared up. It felt like touching the bedrock of reality.

[Read our Pauline Oliveros interview]

There can be sounds which feel highly irritating to us and then there are others we could gladly listen to for hours. Do you have examples for either one or both of these?

Aside from certain loud or high frequency sounds that can cause harm and require protection (and are used as a weapon by the police and the military in sonic warfare), sounds are usually not irritating to me per se. I apply the irritation to the sound.

I often use sound as a window into my own feelings. For example, my downstairs neighbor is a drummer. Some days, his playing irritates me. Other days, I don’t even notice it. When I do find it irritating, I ask myself: Why is this sound bothering me today? Or, more accurately: This sound is irritating me today, so I must be irritated already. It’s a way of acknowledging that my inner being isn’t at peace in that moment.

I’m very sensitive to this dynamic. Sounds are just sounds. It’s culture and circumstances that assign them meaning based on who and what is producing them.

My girlfriend lives on a busy street in Brooklyn, where people blast songs all the time. One day she came up with the idea of making a compilation called “Songs of Bedford Ave”, which would include all the songs she heard outside her window. A wonderful idea: reconfiguring the occasional music blast not as a cause for annoyance but as a way to create a sonic memory of a place.

Another good example: city noise videos on YouTube. The comments reveal people describing how comforting they find the sound of the city—the bustling streets, the distant hum of life heard from the coziness of their bedroom. It makes them feel less alone.

But if you’re standing in the middle of Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan on a Tuesday morning, you probably won’t feel the same way. Why is that? Is it just the volume level? Or is it also because you’re walking to work, dreading a presentation, dealing with a shitty boss, the sounds amplifying your internal turmoil?

I’m not denying that environments can be too loud and overstimulating. Noise pollution (more precisely the sheer quantity and volume of sound sources emitting noise all at once) is a problem in big cities, and even the most mindful person will be affected by it.

But I believe there are meditations we can do to mitigate its impact. Without the means to escape the city every weekend, learning to live within the chaos has become a necessity for many of us.