Camilla Pisani - An alchemy between music and therapy
interview by
Valerio D'Onofrio
We met Camilla Pisani, the Calabrian sound artist based in Rome who in recent years has established herself as one of the most promising figures in Italian experimental electronic music.
Hi Camilla, nice to meet you. While writing your profile I read some of your interviews where you talked about the alchemy of sound and said that “Music is the synesthetic experience par excellence”. Can you explain this concept a bit more for us?
First of all, I want to thank you for the interest you're showing in my artistic research. “Music is the synesthetic experience par excellence” because, through the stimulation of sight and hearing, it gives back images and vibrations, tells stories, reconstructs memories… in a way no other art form can. It was the invention of writing, with the phonetic alphabet, that first brought about a sensory dualism between sight and hearing. This relationship is fundamental to human life, since these senses, more than the other perceptual ones, generate “knowledge”. The latter is made up of the cognitive process that synthesizes sensory data into meaningful forms; that is, through the stimulation of synesthesias. This term, from the Greek “syn” – “with”, “together” – and “aisthesis” (“sensation”), refers to the synchronic perceptual mode that results from the physical stimulation of a single sense, which triggers the mental stimulation of one or more other sensory modalities, even in the absence of a corresponding physical stimulus.
Sensations are closely tied to language, to a vocabulary of words, signs, sounds… with which we describe, communicate, and fix things and events in memory. Knowledge, then, is founded on the simultaneous action of various visual and sonic elements and proceeds through analogical montages that develop the scene free from logical-consequential constraints. Visual observation alone, or a simple sound stimulus, act as a perceptual anticipation for the other modalities, activating the formation of mental images that precede the perception of the object, person, idea or situation… in all its features.
Starting from these two elements, I try, in my own small way, to create an experience; that is, audiovisual landscapes that, through the indirect stimulation of the other perceptual spheres, immerse people in a dynamic, multiple and sensitive dimension, which they will then translate into one or more emotions.
Your music might seem particularly abstract, but is there something specific you want to communicate to your listener?
The project I've been developing since 2013 draws on my audiovisual training, since it's based on the Wagnerian concept, later taken up by Kandinsky, of “Total Art” and on the cognitive power of “synesthesia”. So what interests me is the interaction of multiple expressive forms, in particular graphic signs, sound and space, which I try to shape using technology and new digital media, with the aim of offering multisensory and multimodal listening experiences, marked by the simultaneous involvement of the bodily, emotional, cognitive and social dimensions. My intent, then, is to create “visual sounds” and “sonic architectures”, immersive environments, parallel worlds in which people can let themselves be enveloped and fully immersed, so as to be able to feel their true emotions. Moreover, John Cage stated that “musical composition is the fruit of the interweaving of sound and the noise of life”. Having internalized this awareness, I've shaped my project around the study and elaboration of this physical entity, of its material and organic aspect, and I've focused on sound as a dynamic and multiple flow, alive, organic and tactile; precisely, as an element perceived through the use of multiple senses, whose parameters – such as frequency, amplitude and so on – I then modify and alter, and more specifically, I focus on sonic and emotional intensity.
Your albums are obviously aimed at a niche audience, devoted to listening to experimental electronic music. Who were the musicians, if any, who got you hooked on this sonic world and made you decide to become part of it?
I'm a very curious person and I let myself be influenced by a huge range of fields and genres. That's why I've developed a more articulated project that doesn't only involve the sonic sphere and draws on a number of different influences. The main ones are: the poetics of Abstract Art, in particular the works of Kandinsky, Klee and Klein; the minimalism of the Bauhaus movement and the organic quality of Scandinavian Architecture; the synesthesias of Proust, the sensibility of Pavese, Calvino and Mayakovsky, the rebellion of Irvine Welsh, the cynicism of Kafka; the “graphic score” representations of Cage, Eno, Ligeti, Iannis Xenakis and Roman Haubenstock-Ramati; German Expressionist cinema and French existentialist cinema; the dreamlike dimension of Fellini, Lynch and Miró; the evanescent photography of Andrei Tarkovsky, the multimedia work of Bill Viola, of Studio Azzurro and of Ryoji Ikeda. Musically, meanwhile, the 12K label and Tim Hecker's album “Haunt Me, Haunt Me Do It Again” (for its suspended atmospheres), the minimal wave, post-punk and synth-pop scene of the Eighties and more recent projects like Tropic of Cancer and Marie Davidson; the analogue arpeggiators and sequencers of Doris Norton, the duo Chris & Cosey and Tangerine Dream; the classics and forefathers of electroacoustic and musique concrète (Stockhausen in particular); the electronic and minimal techno scene with artists from Raster and Northern Electronics, Polar Inertia, Ancient Methods, Silent Servant, GAS, SHXCXCHCXSH, Miss Kittin… and the industrial techno-EBM scene put out by labels like Pinkman Records and Mannequin Records.
I know you follow cinema closely: is there something cinematic in your music, or do you keep your two passions separate?
For me, the visual component can't be separated from the sonic one; they're two souls of the same body, completing and intertwining with each other to form my own personal poetics, which many would describe as: complex, dynamic, organic, multiple and multisensory. I've always had a very strong attraction to, and curiosity about, the audiovisual world; in fact, even in my childhood I remember a pronounced inclination for storytelling, an innate need for spectacle and a heavy, constant use of imagination. I used to build imaginary worlds, fanciful stories that I loved, back then, to illustrate, and later, during adolescence, to describe and set down in long, convoluted tales. Creating these new truths of mine was the way I satisfied, silenced and fought off the sense of loneliness, emptiness and dissatisfaction that came from a monotonous, dull, sad provincial life and my own innate inner restlessness. The less I liked what I saw, heard and experienced, the more my mind worked to produce alternative realities. Realities that, over time, came to life, taking on defined, enveloping forms and resonating with tangible, harmonious vibrations.
Two experiences in particular later made me understand that I could turn this attitude of mine into something productive, and that these strange companions would become the essence of my studies, my work and, more generally, my artistic language. The first happened in 2013 at the German Academy of Villa Massimo in Rome, on the occasion of Electric Campfire, an event held in September by what was, at the time, called Raster Noton. During the performances, I was captivated watching the interaction and coordination between abstract shapes and concrete rhythms; so, shortly afterwards, I too decided to start a research project built around that alchemical relationship. Another key moment in my audiovisual formation was my encounter with German Expressionist cinema, with the early- and mid-20th-century artistic avant-gardes, and with David Lynch's masterpiece "Eraserhead", whose soundtrack I consider one of the most beautiful and significant works of sound design ever produced. Through the work of these artists, I understood the real, infinite power of sound as a physical, living, sentient entity, and the close correspondence between the two sensory spheres.
In conclusion, for me music isn't made of frequencies alone: every note or passage corresponds to an image, a clearly defined place. That's why each of my productions presents itself as a story, an experience, to be perceived with multiple senses.
You debuted in 2017 with "Verneshot" — can you tell us what your ideas were back then, and whether they've changed since?
"Verneshot" was a leap into the void, a silent revolution, an unexpected hope... In 1865, Jules Verne's novel "From the Earth To The Moon" introduced the concept of a ballistic projectile escaping Earth's gravity, from which Phipps Morgan and others derived the name "Verneshot" to describe a series of hypothetical extinction events caused by the expulsion of cratonic gas. The phenomena described could be powerful enough to launch an extreme amount of material from the crust and mantle into a sub-orbital trajectory, generating a violent form of mass destruction marked by an earthquake of sound and by an overturning of the ordinary rules of ecosystem survival. "Verneshot" was my explosion... my emancipation... my survival... and, in many ways, my revenge...
Sonically, my early productions leaned toward more experimental genres like drone music, ambient and atonal music. That was because I didn't have a professional setup; I created most of the sounds using VSTs, or with a guitar that I'd stretch and shape digitally. Nowadays, instead, I work in layers, playing a game of overlapping, a "cut and paste" of samples created with analog gear or field recordings and then shaped until they form something uniform. This "patchwork" approach, on which my creative process is based, comes from my design studies and from the teachings of great professionals like Bruno Munari and the Bauhaus instructors.
On "Lithium Salt" (2018) you collaborated with Edoardo Cammisa and recorded "Food Is Our Cancer", which I described as a political manifesto. Can you tell us about the genesis of that track?
With "Food Is Our Cancer" I wanted to exorcise one of the most delicate and intense moments of my life.
Starting with "Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers" (2019), your music becomes richer in rhythmic elements at a certain point — what led you toward that choice?
I conceive of each project as its own growth process and a challenge different from the previous ones; I'm driven by a specific idea, in which I set myself goals and try to work on one particular aspect of sound. On "Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers" I focused on the contrast between dark-ambient atmospheres and obsessive, hammering industrial rhythms. Driven by the need to explore certain sounds further, and influenced by my listening habits in new wave, industrial and minimal techno, I gave life to a second project, a rhythmic alter-ego: Blue Like A Paradox.
These two musical entities of mine are, however, different shades of the same blue, a color with which I identify completely. What they also have in common is my shy, utopian aspiration to search for infinite possibilities. Blue (Camilla), then, is more than a color. It's more than a state of mind, a feeling, or the frequency at which we can see a super-hot flame. It's a state of being... it describes. It can be violent like red, sullen and foreboding like black, or pure like white. Blue, as a seemingly magical element, seems to inhabit a world of its own, through which we enter and exit.
"Blue Like A Paradox" was born out of a need: the need to set my audiovisual project apart from a new line of research based mainly on combining dark, reverb-drenched, surrealist atmospheric pads (sounds that mark and unite pretty much all of my work) with obsessive, mechanical, cold sequences. It moves, then, around minimalist and decadent sounds, industrial and schizophrenic timbres, and games of spatio-temporal alteration through which I build and shape resonant sculptures of terrifying ambiguity.
So, during the creative process, I found myself grappling with this musical bipolarity of mine and with the urge to work with new material — something I didn't yet know how to handle: rhythm, a fundamental element of life and its dynamics, which completed my sensory and sonic palette. Over time, though, I realized there was no real duality, and that I recognized myself completely in BLAP, since the rhythmic element had by then become part of my artistic language and had also seeped into the audiovisual project.
Convinced that "there's no movement without a rhythm" and that it's rhythm that makes it pulsing, real and concrete, I started focusing more and more on timbre and on the power of rhythmic repetition. Right now, my work consists in having the sensitivity and the skill to capture certain moments in order to manipulate them, adapt them and insert them into the stretched-out, vibrating environments that belong to my imagination.
One of your most interesting tracks is "Music Makes Victims", from the album Frozen Alchimia (2020), which I described as "as imposing as a track by Irisarri and as cinematic as one by Vangelis". Do you agree with that description, and what did you mean by that title?
"Music Makes Victims" is a track I'm very attached to; it carries me away and I enjoy playing it so much that I always include it in my live sets. The title has a double meaning: the first is personal, since my family has always looked at this passion of mine, and many of my professional choices, with skepticism; the other belongs to the social sphere, as it stands as a criticism of the Italian state's timid investment and support policies toward the profession and the arts in general; this indifference leads — indeed, forces — many artists to move abroad just to practice their profession, or to look for another job, treating music as a "recreational" activity to pursue in one's "free time".
With “Nausea Is A Noble Feeling” (2020) you drew inspiration from the philosopher Heidegger, and I was particularly struck by the sixteen minutes of “I’ve Never Been Able To Wedge My Smiles And My Panic Attacks”, which reminded me of something by John Carpenter. It might also be your most ambitious track, would you agree?
The EP draws on the concept of love professed by the French intellectual Simone de Beauvoir, who defines it as “the highest form of personal freedom and the regeneration of social relationships”. “Desidero che ogni vita umana sia pura e trasparente libertà”. Influenced by Heidegger's thought, she understands how the human being, once thrown into the world at birth, is condemned by their own freedom, because they are forced to be responsible for everything they do. As a result, the individual's existence precedes their essence: each of us is defined not by our own nature, but by our thought, which always turns into action. Individual responsibility, besides being proof of the freedom that characterizes the human condition, is at the same time a burden to carry for a lifetime, one that manifests itself in every moment we are called upon to make a decision: choosing is conceived as both a private and a social process. So, she herself aspires to the unconsciousness of pure feeling and to the intelligence needed to bend time, to abandon everything only to find it again.
“Nausea Is A Noble Feeling” was created and released in 2020, the year we all reflected on the meaning of freedom and on its importance, impossibility and evanescence. Conceptually, it anticipated my latest work, “Phant[as]”, centered on the concept of “illusion”, which I'll talk about in more detail later. The track “I’ve Never Been Able To Wedge My Smiles And My Panic Attacks” stands as a long ancestral rite, a rhythmic flow… a hypnotic dance that was magnificently directed, imagined and treated by the talented visual artist Sara Bonaventura, who made a video that was featured on FACT Magazine and selected for several international video art festivals.
References to science fiction often recur in your records, from the theme of “Vernershot” to the Urania-style cover of “Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers”. Is there a particular reason for this?
No, not at all. I'm not a fan of the genre. In “Verneshot”, I drew inspiration from Jules Verne's novel “From The Earth To The Moon”, as the scientific phenomenon described in the work perfectly captured my emotional state and what I wanted to convey with the album. Whereas, in “Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers”, the choice of artwork was prompted by the label Mu Versatile Label, which had adopted the Urania cover layout for its NUIT series, of which the release is part.
Your latest LP is “Phant[as]” (2022), in which, among many other things, you mention Brian Eno. Can you tell us about this album and your connection to Eno's music?
“Phant[as]” is a journey into my horror-filled imagination, a lucid nightmare fueled by my many inner wars. The 9 tracks are like mirrors projecting my darkest thoughts, lanterns for my most intimate fears. The project is influenced by Phantasmagoria, a form of theater that spread mainly in Paris in the 18th century, in which images of skeletons, demons and ghosts were projected onto walls and/or sheets. During these shows, a rapid succession of lights, smoke, illusions, ghosts and specters was created, deceiving and astonishing the audience. The spirits appeared in a multitude of different forms; some emerged wrapped in a cloud and seemed to take on a body before vanishing; others appeared in the distance and gradually grew larger, then, after approaching those present, withdrew, shrinking in the same way. Still others crashed against the faces of the spectators as if trying to touch them, and then suddenly dissolved into the dark.
The album, then, revolves around the concept of “illusion”, to be understood as a rapid succession of images, sounds, colors, objects and actions that vividly strike the senses and the imagination, showing unreal and intangible figures that are nonetheless visible and paralyzing, just like our fears. In each track, in fact, I confront a different anxiety of mine, negative thoughts that belong to me and have shaped the last years of my life (March 2020 – February 2022), and that describe a sad condition shared by many of my peers (toxic relationships; job insecurity and professional exploitation; the intangibility of the future, translated into frustration, exhaustion/despair, disconnection, claustrophobia and a longing for escape; anguish, panic and a sense of powerlessness in the face of nature and illness). The project presents itself as a cathartic experience in which I exorcise my mental ghosts and confront, challenge and fight them with the powerful, intense and persuasive weapon of sound, made up of obsessive rhythms and evanescent atmospheres. Finally, the reference to magic lanterns is tied to my research in the audiovisual field, since they were among the first performances that attempted, through the combination of moving graphic representations, light effects and sound, to achieve a greater sensory and emotional involvement in the audience.
As for the connection to Brian Eno's work, his influence on my artistic research is total, both conceptually (I share with the Maestro an attention to the multisensory nature of art and the mind's instinctive tendency toward synesthetic language) and stylistically (I try to pair every sound with a visual dimension, whether through the creation of graphic scores (a reference point being the graphic score for “Music For Airports“) or through sensory associations, like the one he theorized in “Light Music”, between color/light and sound frequency.
Would you like to one day record the soundtrack for a film? Is that something you've thought about?
Yes, of course! I'd be interested in working on a soundtrack or a live scoring project. Recently, I did a small experiment, adapting the track “Endorphins In Oststrand” to the 1929 German film “Menschen am Sonntag” (directed by Robert Siodmak and Edgar G. Ulmer). The result was an exciting exchange between the visual and the sonic elements, in which the images gave the track a context, outlining the psycho-physical boundaries within which the listener could move, while the track, in turn, enriched the video with an enormous emotional charge.
What are your plans for the near future?
Since I don't take myself too seriously, I don't have any schedules to stick to or pressures of any kind; I make music mainly because it makes me feel good, and I want to keep pursuing my research. So I let myself be carried along by events, by feelings and above all by intuition. Right now, I'm working on a new album in which I'll introduce the intimate sound of my own voice. I think this is the biggest challenge I've set for myself artistically so far, because it requires an extreme, if not total, baring of oneself, but also a certain flexibility, in order to tell, play with and sympathize with one's own monsters without being swallowed up by them. That's my priority right now. Then, at the end of April, I'll be returning to my beloved Berlin to perform at the Theater im Delphi, at an event organized by our friends from the Waxing Phases collective. I can't wait! Thank you for your/everyone's time!
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Valerio D'Onofrio, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Camilla Pisani on OndaRock
Discography
| Verneshot (Ovunqve, 2017) | ||
| Lithium Salt (Sounds Against Humanity, 2018) | ||
| Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers (MU Versatile Label, 2019) |  |
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| Frozen Alchimia (Midira Records, 2020) | ||
| Nausea Is A Noble Feeling Ep (Camilla Pisani Self-released, 2020) | |
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| Phant[as] (Aesthetical, 2022) | ||
| Konstellationen (Aesthetical, 2026) |
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