Il castello delle uova - Progressive in metamorphosis

A work straddling the border between music, poetry and theatre, "Appunti sonori per una cosmogonia caotica" is one of the best Italian albums of 2007. Steeped up to its neck in progressive and OuLiPo aesthetics, it manages to rise effortlessly above the web of its thousand references. The Palermo-based group Il castello delle uova recorded it seven years ago, but it's only been on sale since last year.

As soon as I heard the record, I arranged with guitarist Pietro Li Causi, mastermind of the band alongside Salvatore Sinatra and Abele Gallo, so that he could personally introduce the work and the group to OndaRock's readers.

You call yourselves a post-prog band: what do you mean by that? In your record I hear a lot more than just Seventies-style progressive, yet the aesthetic still seems fiercely "progressive". In what way can this approach to music still have something to say?

Let's say that Salvatore, Abele and I did indeed start out from prog. Our first serious project, BraindeaD, was in fact clearly tied to the Italian tradition of the genre. With Il castello delle uova, though, we decided we had to try to move beyond its excesses.

What we've always loved about prog is the idea of contaminating styles, and the ability to bring into a blatantly popular discourse themes and motifs drawn from literature, from classical music, or even from jazz (or, in our case, from acid jazz and free-jazz).

Only by returning to those original impulses do I think adherence to a progressive aesthetic can still have something to say, whereas certain virtuosic extremes typical of contemporary prog (especially American prog) leave us rather cold and puzzled.

That's perhaps why the prefix "post" suits us, precisely because – at least in our intentions – it sets us apart from what has become the standard format of the genre, but also because it deliberately echoes the reflections typical of postmodern thought – which particularly influenced my writing of the poem that shares its name with the band – on the concept of hybridization or on the self-referential nature of the human. In this sense, I'm thinking less of Donna Haraway's well-known "Cyborg Manifesto" (which I find needlessly extreme) than of the work of Italian zooanthropologist Roberto Marchesini, for instance "Post-human". 

Your band's approach is rather peculiar. You recorded an album in 2001, pressed it in 2005, and only distributed it in 2007. You no longer play live and don't perform together, yet you claim to be "vanished" rather than broken up. What's the reason behind these choices?

Well, there's partly the laziness that usually sets in once you're past thirty, and there are also – I know it's not a very rock'n'roll term to use – the “responsibilities” of adult life, with the related difficulty of coordinating everyone's schedules in the band. But there's also the nausea you feel – after having played around quite a bit (with BraindeaD) – once you realize that rock and alternative music have essentially become market products like any other, just as live shows are nothing more than forms of promotion (for which, incidentally, artists charge increasingly hefty fees to recoup what they lose from peer-to-peer downloads).

In short, at a certain point we decided we had no desire to build ourselves up as small-town divas and burn ourselves out gigging under the thumb of some agent. We preferred, precisely, to "vanish" – to be discovered without being seen – which allows us to promote the CD in a soft way, with little or no involvement of middlemen, while keeping the price low. Obviously we made this choice because we can afford to. We live in that hugely marginal outpost of the American empire that is Sicily, and at a certain point we realized that – at least within our local context – the best way to make quality music was precisely to avoid becoming professional musicians.

Paradoxically, I think that if we've managed to create something original (though it's not for us to judge!), it's precisely because we don't depend on music as a trade, and because other jobs put bread on the table. My impression is that if you want to live off music – at least while staying in Sicily – you end up either enslaved to the majors (though I hear the indies aren't exactly a picnic either!) or playing anywhere and under any conditions. There's obviously the more extreme option (worthy of the utmost respect), which is to risk poverty and hardship rather than compromise. But at least for me, with a daughter and a second child on the way, that's not something I can afford. So I'd rather scale back the space I devote to music, but make it on terms that fully satisfy me, than starve the people around me or sell myself short.

On your Myspace page (though you just have to listen to the album to notice it) you cite a huge range of influences, many of them non-musical. Your record is, after all, a meeting point between several arts: music, theatre, poetry... How can literature influence the musical side of a work, and how do musical ideas find their way into the lyrics?

Off the top of my head, I'd say there are many ways to make literature and music interact, and that anyone – if they want to and are able – can find their own. I should also say that I find it perfectly natural not to draw distinctions between the different art forms. If we consider, for instance, that ancient tragedies and comedies were born as multimedia texts in which it was impossible to separate the written word from the gesture and music that accompanied it, then we understand how much the distinctions we're used to are actually a product of the modern era (and of the resulting commodification of artistic objects, which need to be easily classifiable in order to be sold more effectively).

As for the rest, it's easier for me to describe our own experience of composing. Thinking of a piece as a story means giving it a structure that follows its developments, not so much to turn it into a sonic caption, but to convey a sense of movement and evolution that mirrors the unfolding of the story (or the lyrics).

Obviously, the possibility of thinking of a piece as an evolution of themes or sections is closely tied to the aesthetic of prog you mentioned at the start of the interview.

Among your clear and declared guiding spirits are Area, King Crimson and Raymond Queneau. What have you learned from these three artists?

From these artists – as from many others – I think we've learned a great deal. Once again, it comes down to the idea of blending genres together and playing with them, knowing how to parody them too (especially in the case of Area and Queneau) without ever slipping into the merely goofy. But if I had to single out one lesson from each, I'd say that from Area we love the idea of revolution and the rock impetus that runs through them; from Queneau, the inclination toward divertissement and the idea of combinatorics; while from King Crimson we've always admired the extraordinary ability to move beyond the concept of the song and their ongoing search for new forms over the years, as well as their skill in using very simple, repetitive harmonizations as a canvas to play with sound.

But it's really from the Crimson King's parallel projects (the various ProjeKct I, II, III and X) that I feel we drew a kind of illumination. On one hand, Ciccio and Abele found inspiration in these projects for their use of composite, shifting rhythms; on the other, Salvatore and I developed the idea of an alienating, schizoid soundscaping, built partly through sequencing, partly through loop recording, and partly through improvisation.

But that's not all. In fact, King Crimson are also a point of reference for us – a somewhat comforting one, if you like – because of their longevity, precisely since they've always proven that even well past sixty you can rock much harder (and generally much better) than twenty-somethings. More than anything, for us, as we approach forty, they're an example of how to age well without turning into dinosaurs, always trying to creatively rework and transform one's own musical language.

The classic trite question: what are your 10 "desert island" albums today?

Some friends recently asked me this same question, and I ended up drawing up a list of about 150 albums for them. This time I'll limit myself to ten out of respect for OndaRock's readers, but I want to point out that if I had to answer a second time, the list would probably change depending on how I'm feeling in the moment. For now, here's my answer:

Your approach to guitar is very free, at times almost "terroristic." Can you briefly tell us about your journey of instrumental exploration? What aspects are you most interested in working on?

When I was playing in BraindeaD I was obsessed with guitar heroes. Steve Vai, John Petrucci, Satriani, but above all Vernon Reid of Living Colour. Then, little by little, I started getting bored with the acrobatics, and I became drawn, on one hand, to more cerebral guitarists like Robert Fripp or David Torn, and on the other, to bands that worked on sounds, timbres and dissonance. Sonic Youth, for instance, or also Marlene Kuntz.

From the latter, and especially from Sonic Youth, I took the idea of playing guitar as a disturbing, and as you put it, "terroristic" tool, something that continuously breaks the spell and tears through the sonic and harmonic fabric, surprising it now with hyper-metric, out-of-scale phrases, now with noises (which, in my case, can even recall animal sounds).

So I went from a heavy use of racks and multi-effects (in BraindeaD) to searching for almost natural forms of sound. For the recording of "appunti sonori per una cosmogonia caotica", the only sounds are those of my ENGL amp head, and the only effects I used were two pitch shifters chained together, which I used to reach extremely high or extremely low frequencies (some of the bass sounds on the record are actually produced with my guitar), and an old-generation loop recorder that let me record live phrases and structures for Salvatore, Ciccio, Aldo and me to have fun playing and dueting over.

The lyrics are a continuous interweaving of "beginning" and "end," a web of universal metamorphoses in which every effect determines every cause. Is it just a surreal narrative game, or does it reflect a sort of personal philosophical vision?

I'd say it's both. On one hand there's a strong surrealist streak (and, truth be told, also a fair amount of quotation). The idea of writing a cosmicomic poem came to me from reading Raymond Queneau's "Piccola cosmogonia portatile", but also from Italo Calvino's "Cosmicomiche", Ovid's "Metamorfosi", and the Stoic theories on ekpyrhosis.

So it was, largely, a metaliterary game. As often happens, though, nothing is more serious than play. The micro-stories told through the voice of this dazed character, Apollo Dionisi, are in fact all stories about crossing thresholds, about continuous passages from the zoosphere to the anthroposphere. The underlying idea is that of a humanity which, on pain of falling back into violence and the destruction of otherness, can only recognize its own continuity with the animal kingdom and with nature in general.

On the other hand, the idea that emerges is that of the impossibility of order, or rather of order from noise, an order that forms randomly, following unpredictable paths that nonetheless start from unchanging patterns. This idea, which runs through the lyrics, also guided the way we composed the music. We started from a minimal set of loops and fixed guitar and keyboard structures made by me and Salvatore. We then used these foundations, both live and in the studio, as an actual script to improvise over.

Why spoken word instead of singing?

The idea of music merging with a spoken text came to me from an experiment I did in 1997 during a stay in America. For fun, I ended up providing the accompaniment for a theatrical adaptation of Queneau's Exercices de style, for a Parisian friend of mine who was teaching a French course at Brown University. What fascinated me on that occasion was the extreme freedom a musician has in building sonic backdrops for a text that doesn't necessarily have to follow them or be bound by them.

Truth be told, the first run-throughs of "appunti sonori" also included some sung parts. We had in fact gotten in touch with a vocalist, Nicola Agugliaro (currently with Freedom, a band from Trapani that Abele still collaborates with). But as we kept rehearsing the project, we realized that Benny's acting (who, besides acting and directing experience, had also been part of a few Sicilian posses) had an intrinsic strength of its own, which eventually led us to drop the idea of vocal parts altogether.

What do you think of the current state of Italian rock within the independent circuits?

Well, I see that there's a lot of really talented, really interesting people around. Even in Palermo, after years in the dark ages, you could say there's finally a music scene (certainly not thanks to - I imagine - whoever runs the city). Sticking to Italy, I find our fellow Sicilians Marta sui Tubi, whom we've known for a while, very interesting.

The feeling I get, though, is paradoxically one of saturation. It's become so easy to find good music that, faced with such an overwhelming amount on offer, I always end up comfortably retreating into the classics, simply because I don't have time to truly make new discoveries my own. So, faced with the disarming ease with which you can find good stuff, there's perhaps a kind of phenomenon - not so much a disappearance as an eclipse - of the figure of the musician (a phenomenon our own disappearance is really just an acknowledgment of), caused perhaps precisely by the technologies that support consumption, which have become incredibly advanced and pervasive.

Perhaps, indeed, we should play less and listen less, but with greater attention, and with more time given to both making and listening. Maybe that's the only way to resist the loss of meaning and the forgetting.

The last time I was truly amazed listening to something was with Beck, Jeff Buckley and Radiohead's "OK Computer". After them there's definitely been interesting stuff, but I struggle to recall an album that has truly struck or surprised me recently.

Maybe – though I risk sounding parochial – I'd say "Muscoli e dei" by Marta sui Tubi and "Pocket-sized socialism" by Offlaga Disco Pax. They're Italian. I'd also add Digital Nivurisiccia, a band I discovered through myspace whose members I haven't yet had the honor of meeting in person. They're guys from Petrosino, which is my area. Does that count as an answer too?

As I was telling you, we're not so interested in making money from music, but rather in trying to make good music, music that first of all pleases us and satisfies our own tastes (which are actually pretty demanding, to be honest!). In our CD, moreover, it's written in plain letters that anyone who wants to, as has been happening for years with Wu Ming's books, can download or (even better) copy our work as long as it's not for profit.

Peer-to-peer doesn't worry me so much because it feeds a large share of non-paying audience (after all, if someone doesn't pay maybe it's because they can't afford to, right?), but rather because it can create dynamics of consumption rather than listening. And above all because, especially among younger people, it can foster dynamics that have more to do with quantity than with quality.

What we hope for ourselves, though, isn't so much to become successful with our music or to become U2 (that would stress us out quite a bit!), but to scrape together enough money to fund a second record. That's what we're asking of anyone who's appreciated us. In a way, the logic is similar to that of free software: we expect a small contribution only from those who can and want to give one!

If few people – or no one – want to, it will mean that either we'll stop, or maybe we'll come back with a second CD only in ten or twenty years, or perhaps when we've got prostate trouble and we're all on blood pressure pills!

And instead, what does one have to do to buy your record?

On our myspace page, anyone who wants to can find all the necessary instructions. We wanted to avoid distribution companies, along with the resulting price increase that would have entailed. I think the best approach is always (not only in the case of music, but also, simply, for fruit and vegetables) to try to avoid as many layers of middlemen as possible.

Anyone living in Palermo or Marsala can find the CD in our friends' shops, such as "La bottega del mondo", a fair-trade shop in Palermo, while anyone living outside our area can either download it (at a token price) or order their own print on demand copy from www.lulu.com, or else reserve it directly through our myspace page, paying via Paypal. As for the rest, we've decided to allow, intermittently – during specific periods of the year that we'll announce on myspace – full streaming of the album on last.fm.

(11/01/2008)

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