A Winged Victory For The Sullen - Sober ecstasy

I find it truly remarkable how you managed to bring your creativity together and, as a result, blend your styles... I've always thought that when a collaboration between two musicians works this well, the result is something incredible and often unlike anything found in other art forms... What do you think?

Personally, I love collaborating. You can always find new ideas much more easily that way, ideas that neither of you would ever have come up with alone. I love collaborating as much as I love working alone, but doing everything by yourself all the time eventually gets boring. Besides, collaborating with strong personalities is a challenge to yourself and your own ideas, and it helps you grow.

In your case, how did you manage to find that balance? Did you run into any difficulties relating to and reconciling your styles and approaches?

Actually, it's always been a very natural balance, one we found pretty quickly. I think we both spent a lot of time exploring different sides of music. And when we started making music together, it was easy to make sure each of us gave the other space while also bringing our best to the table. Adam is great at creating space and finding what's essential in a piece... and I think I'm good at building melodic structures. Besides, each of us learned a lot from the other, and now it's all blended together. Now, on the new album, it's actually quite hard to say who did what: there were even times when I'd play guitar and he'd play piano, for instance.

How did the idea for this project come about, and where does the name you chose come from?

We met in 2007 in Bologna, at a Sparklehorse concert. At the time Adam was playing guitar for him, and my friend and sound engineer Francesco Donadello invited me to the show. We met backstage after the show and talked mostly about Americans living in Europe, but then we swapped some music and ended up becoming fans of each other. The name is partly inspired by the ancient Greek statue at the Louvre with a similar name, while the word "sullen" stands for that melancholy that seems to be separate and distant from us. We wanted a name that would sound epic if spoken in slow motion, in black and gold.

What's the relationship between this project and your latest "solo" work?

Everything we've done before obviously has an effect on what we do now. But I think that together we're looking for new paths and a new world to explore, a world that belongs only to our collaboration.

Listening to your music, I had the feeling I was facing something pure and intimate. That's an aspect that applies especially to "Atomos", in my opinion. What other differences do you see compared to your first album?

We can't separate our emotions from the music, we need to "feel it on our skin" and thus connect it to emotions... But there were definitely also external influences, especially that of choreographer Wayne McGregor, who gave us the basic concept and a lot of ideas to work on.

Speaking of which, the record was actually born as the soundtrack for one of his ballets! The tracks almost seem like so many atoms of a single molecule, to paraphrase the title...

And that's precisely because the album was commissioned for that ballet, which was originally meant to take the form of a single long act. In the end it was split into three parts, further divided into shorter sections... the music followed that scheme, evolving and adapting, but it was conceived as one long piece; thinking of those tracks as separate wouldn't really make sense.

Both your albums came out on two leading labels of the contemporary scene: Kranky and Erased Tapes. Why did you choose this dual-release format, and how did you find working this way? What do you think of the two labels?

There's a ton of talent putting out records on both, but they're two very different labels. If someone asked us to describe Kranky's core sound in one word, we'd say "ambient"; for Erased Tapes, we'd say "post-classical". I like the fact that we don't fall under either definition, that we have a voice of our own.

How do you build your live sets together, and what does the live dimension mean to you?

When we finished the first album we weren't sure we'd be able to translate it into a live show, but we slowly found a way to do it, and we loved discovering a new kind of strength in the live setting! Using subwoofers and powerful bass amps helped a lot in that respect. It's often hard to translate music that was conceived and recorded in the studio into a live performance, but I think a lot of past experience helped us find a way to pull it off. We love playing live, anyway…

What venues do you think work best for your music?

Churches and old theatres… Those are the places where the acoustics and the atmosphere best suit what we do.

Will you be bringing “Atomos” to the stage? And if so, do you plan to do it with a string section?

Yes, we'll have quite a few dates where we'll perform the whole album live with a small string ensemble.

What other instruments do you usually bring on stage?

I play piano and handle the electronics, Adam plays guitar with various effects and some keyboards.

And last but not least, will you be passing through Italy?

Finally, yes! On November 29th at the Locomotiv in Bologna, it'll be our first-ever Italian show together!

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