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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 acoustic ecology or his thoughts about sound in general.



Can you talk a bit about your interest in or fascination for sound? What were early experiences which sparked it?

The first memory related to sound that I remember comes from when I was four.

I remember clearly I was at a band soundcheck - unfortunately I don’t know which band it was - straddling my father's shoulders and suddenly the drummer started to check the bass drum. Instantly, my chest and belly vibrated and something awakened inside me. At six I started playing drums and I have always been fascinated by the infinite possibility of sounds that drums can emit by playing them in various ways.

I was also a full-time beatboxer and my curiosity was always caught by any sort of natural or environmental sounds. My goal was to replicate them with my mouth. With hindsight, I see this as a way of internalizing and analyzing sounds as well as the meanings hidden behind them, something that my mind constantly does nowadays - not just with sounds but also with symbols, colors, smells and flavors.

This had a very central influence on my approach to music production: I feel based more on sound research than complex harmonisations or virtuosity.

Which artists, approaches, albums or performances using sound in an unusual or remarkable way captured your imagination in the beginning?

When I was six my sister came back from London. She brought cassettes and a whole cultural background that definitely contaminated me a lot. I remember listening to underground urban jungle music tapes as well as The Prodigy, Roni Size, Jamiroquai and Goldie tracks.

It always makes me smile thinking about how videos of Prodigy tracks like “Voodoo People”, “Smack My Bitch Up” or “Firestarter”, recorded by my sister from Mtv on videocassette and played back in a loop, were scaring me so much at that time. Then my background as a drummer brought me several inspirations, from Trilok Gurtu’s hybrid approach on ethnic percussion and drums, to the amazing soundtrack of the movie The Birdman composed by Antonio Sanchez.



It all finally led me to the installations and audio-visual shows by artists such as: Ryoji Ikeda, Ryoichi Kurokawa, Alva Noto & Ryuichi Sakamoto, Ben Frost (his surround live-set at Labirinto della Masone), NIN, Thom Yorke with Tarik Barri, Robert Henke and many others.



I love to go to as many shows, art exhibitions, installations and absurd happenings as possible because I find it a great way to foster my imagination and creativity, to broaden the horizon of my mind and to question myself and my work.

What's your take on how your upbringing and cultural surrounding have influenced your sonic preferences?

Being born and raised in a small provincial town in Northern Italy, I felt on my shoulders the cultural pressure of the American / European economic crisis and, consequently, the cultural and educational impoverishment to which my generation has been subjected, supported by the psychological discomfort instilled by politics that use communication as a weapon and words as a knife to divide and oppress instead of unite and heal.

I’m pretty sure these factors triggered reactions on different levels and raised various stages of elaboration through the media that most spontaneously allowed me to express myself such as: music, poetry, painting and lastly photography.

Probably in response to these attacks and in parallel with endless other factors, there was a great musical ferment in my hometown, so many bands of different genres, battling it out on stages of all kinds everywhere, everytime. At the age of fourteen I was on stage with my first band, experiencing music as a way of feeling part of a community but also as a way to express feelings and emotions.

There is another important factor related to my hometown; I can clearly see a direct correlation between the foggy and mist-filled landscapes moving from white to gray and back, that makes the sun a pale white dot in the sky. It's like an immaterial reality pouring out from the canals at a certain hour of the afternoon, that makes everything unreal, sometimes dreamy sometimes spooky. I can sense the connection between these impressions and the rarefied sounds, dense background drone and state of stillness that characterize most of my compositions.

Also the use of noise, distortion and saturation perceptible in my tracks, can all be traced back to that cultural and environmental background. They're balancing between massive industrialisation, flatland anthropogenic landscapes where nothing has been left to nature and every corner has been massively exploited and the stagnant landscape typical of a swamp, seemingly endless horizon, a dense and humid air filled with thousand smells and sometimes, here and there, even flashes of silence.

I could describe it as a “processed scream”.