Ciro Perrino - Celeste - In the realm of the Mellotron

interview by Federico Romagnoli

With and without his Celeste, a cult band of prog Italian, the keyboardist and drummer from Sanremo Ciro Perrino is an important name in the national musical underground, with a career now spanning over half a century. We meet him for a chat covering his journey from the early days to now, touching on the countless projects he's been part of along the way.

Hello Ciro. Tell us how Celeste came about and how you first made contact with the record industry.

Celeste emerged from the dissolution of Il Sistema, a seminal band active from 1969 until the final months of 1971. Together with Luciano Cavanna, the bassist and singer, I had given life to that project, which led us to create a very distinctive genre that, unbeknownst to us at the time, was a forerunner of what years later would come to be called progressive rock.

With Leonardo Lagorio, the only other survivor besides me from that lineup, we decided to pursue a new musical vision based on premises slightly removed from the dominant rock sound, moving instead towards a more "Mediterranean" style and towards the traditions of Italian classical music. Our first contact with the record industry was about as easy as it gets. Il Sistema had in fact been under contract with Nico Di Palo's promotion and concert-organizing agency, so the meeting with Vittorio De Scalzi, who was setting up the Grog label, happened almost instantly (ed. note: Di Palo and De Scalzi were both members of New Trolls). Vittorio himself sat in on one of our rehearsal sessions, fell in love with what we were doing, and immediately offered us a contract for a first record.

Celeste began recording their debut album in the early months of 1974 and finished at the start of 1975. Why did the sessions drag on for a whole year?

Yes, the gestation was quite long and troubled. The first rehearsals that would eventually lead to "Principe di un giorno" began in September 1972 and continued right up until recording started in 1974. The new style wasn't built on familiar, established conventions, so once the project was ready, whether out of fear or a lack of courage on the part of the record producers to put out something outside the norm, the master ended up sitting in a drawer, only to be released a year later in 1976, by which time the still-unnamed progressive rock phenomenon was already on the wane.

"Celeste" (aka: "Principe di un giorno") is an album steeped in Mellotron. What struck you about that instrument, and how did you come to own one? If you don't mind, could you also explain how it actually works?

Ah, the Mellotron! Ever since "Nights In White Satin" by the Moody Blues, I'd been fascinated by that warm sound, so reminiscent of an orchestra. But back then I was mainly a drummer, so it felt like a foreign instrument to me. Listening to other artists gave me new inspiration, which eventually drew me towards the instrument.

How could we forget King Crimson! The desire to own one, a Mellotron, was becoming more and more pressing. The problem was that its cost, aside from the fact that it was pretty hard to find one in Italy, was so high it would discourage anyone who wasn't well-off. But I didn't give up and, helped by my father, who always supported me quietly and discreetly on my musical journeys, I managed to buy one just before going into the studio with Celeste.

The Mellotron was, in any case – talking about the early ones, the M400 to be precise – a cumbersome, hulking box, unsteady on its delicate little black wooden supports, and absolutely unreliable in terms of technical performance (the tapes were forever getting jammed in their dedicated "corridors"). Every time you pressed a key it was a real gamble. You could never be sure, the next time you hit that note, that the spring had done its job and returned the sound-carrying tape to position. A nightmare! But the sound... pure magic!

Reviews at the time weren't particularly positive. How did you react to that?

We reacted with a certain amount of frustration. Unfortunately, as I mentioned in another answer, the fact that the album came out, let's say, past its moment cost it the attention of the audience and the critics, who were already following other acts that were emerging on the music scene at the time. It remained in the shadows, appreciated only by a handful of enthusiasts, until it was rediscovered in the early the Eighties.

What led to the band splitting up? Which happened, by the way, while you were recording a new album...

The usual disagreements. But above all it was my stance on the other band members' choices, since they didn't want to take that famous "leap into the unknown" and commit themselves, at least for a while, solely and exclusively to a path based on steady dedication.

In practice, what I was asking was to move from semi-amateurism to full-on professionalism, taking on all the risks that came with it. But unfortunately some of them didn't feel ready to give up a steady, secure job for the band, and at that point, for me, there was no longer any good reason to carry on like that, without a clear purpose or plan. We were finishing up a new album that was already practically ready. The demos were perfect and showed a turn toward jazz-rock. I had given up drums and was starting to focus on keyboards, flute, and percussion like marimba and xylophone, and on writing material, not just lyrics. But around the first half of 1977 the situation, by then untenable, came to a head and... everyone went their own way.

The album's rediscovery came about thanks to the Japanese reissues (on vinyl in 1981, on CD in 1987). First of all, how did it happen that they reissued those records in Japan? Were you involved, or did you find out about it afterwards? Secondly: how did you react when, thanks to that initiative, your cult following also began to spread to the West.

It's all very simple, really. We found out about the Japanese releases in the most fortuitous and mundane way. We heard from other musicians, who at the time were also signed to Grog, that their album had been released in Japan. From there, discovering that the entire Grog and Magma catalogue had been licensed to a Japanese label was just a matter of moments. No one had the courtesy or the kindness to let us know. In fact, among other things, we never received a single lira from that operation. So I'd say our reaction was a mix of joy and astonishment, combined with the annoyance of having been neither informed nor compensated, even with the bare minimum that was actually stipulated in the contracts. Interest in the band, which had previously almost fallen into oblivion, started to grow, and that's when I decided to build a network (though the Web didn't exist yet), creating lists, addresses and so on, what today we'd call mailing list, of fans, which proved extremely useful when Celeste made their comeback in 2019 with the album "Il risveglio del principe".

During the the Seventies, besides Celeste, you were part of many other bands, and released a lot of material in the early the Nineties. Il Sistema, La Compagnia Digitale, SNC and St. Tropez. Tell us about them.

After a few years of musical "adolescence" spent with bands (that's what bands were called in the the Sixties), in 1969 I joined a lineup for the first time that was determined to take a more serious path and pursue a proper career on the road, made up of concerts and gigs. I'm talking about the formation of Il Sistema, the group with which we toured the length and breadth of Italy, even performing in the nearby Côte d'Azur. That experience ended in the autumn of 1971, and after a break of less than a year, came the Celeste period, which ended in the spring of 1977, when the St. Tropez adventure began right away, another "musical creature" rich in shades of psychedelic rock and atmospheres (just to give you an idea) along the lines of Gong or Steve Hillage.

After that, though it was really a flash in the pan, came La Compagnia Digitale, which left behind only the recording of its one and only concert, held in August 1979, later released as a remastered CD and vinyl in 2022. From there, after yet another breakup, my solo career began with the releases of "Solare" in 1980.

Your solo career began with electronic music albums close to German cosmic couriers and new age, which marked quite a departure from your previous work. How did the need to try out this new form of expression come about? And what technology were you using at the time?

By nature I'm curious and I love experimenting, exploring new fields, constantly having new experiences. Ever since I bought my very first synth (an archaic Davoli Synth), almost as a game, I've never stopped expanding my collection of synthesizers, electronic drums, and later samplers and keyboards. "Solare" in 1980 was the peak of this new approach, which had actually already begun years earlier within the bands I was playing in. For instance, with St. Tropez and La Compagnia Digitale I made extensive use of synthesizers and sequencer. Among others, Minimoog, Arp 2600, Eminent, Arp Omni-2, Mellotron, Korg, etc.

Your Nineties were marked by the releases of a lot of archival material, but also by the continuation of your own solo career. Tell us about the albums from that period.

Yes, the Nineties were full of rediscoveries and the reissues that came with them. Ever since the very first bands I played with back in the Sixties, I used to obsessively record our rehearsal sessions. The idea was to be able to listen back later, at leisure, to check on things and try to improve. But since I barely erased anything, almost without realizing it, I built up a mass of material, mostly consisting of hundreds of cassette tapes. That's how an enormous archive came into being. I still have the recordings of my first important band, which used to perform in dance halls and clubs playing the cover songs of the day.

Then came Il Sistema. From 1969 to 1971 I recorded every single session, every day, in the room we'd turned into a rehearsal space. Those recordings gave us our first CDs, and I still releases material from them periodically, keeping interest in this seminal band alive. And then I rediscovered the recordings of Celeste's never-released second album, which came out under the title "Celeste II" only on vinyl. At the same time I was breathing new life into my solo career, which had been on hold for ten years after "Solare", releasing "Far East" in 1990, "The Inner Garden" in 1992, "Moon In The Water" in 1994, "De rerum natura" in 1997, the first version of "L'isola" together with a full symphony orchestra in 2001, and then, over time, "L'isola" in a version for small ensemble in 2006, "Piccole ali nel vento" for solo piano in 2011, and "Back Home", released in 2016.

What made you pick the Celeste project back up in 2019? A project which, from that point on, turned out to be extremely prolific, with four albums in five years. What sparked this sudden rekindling?

Since as early as 2013 I'd been getting requests from fans and various producers urging me to put the band back together. Industry insiders were saying that interest in Celeste had never really faded over time, so a new album would surely be welcomed by our supporters. But nothing came of it, because my old musical travel companions weren't interested.

In 2018, while going through material from the many pieces – often just sketched out – that I periodically archive because I don't necessarily see them fitting certain projects, I discovered I had more than enough compositions to put together a new Celeste record with a mood close to the band's original spirit. That's how "Il risveglio del principe" came about. Then I got carried away and the inspiration kept coming, and "Il risveglio del principe" was followed in 2021 by "Il principe del regno perduto" and then again in 2023 by "Celeste With Celestial Symphony Orchestra", right up to these days, when we've released "Echoes of a Future Past". And now we're moving forward!

So tell us about “Echoes of a Future Past”, released in May 2024.

“Echoes of a Future Past” is the band's official fifth chapter. While staying true to the spirit and atmospheres our fans and supporters are used to, we made a slight shift towards a looser, more jazz-inflected language, but nothing drastic. Celeste is always Celeste: so Mellotron, flutes, ethereal, dreamlike soundscapes bolstered by a driving, pulsing rhythm section, with various soloists trading off on sax, electric guitars and violin.

A more technical question: what gear do you use today? How did you approach the era of computer-made music?

Today, like most musicians, I often turn to plugins which offer an endless range of possibilities as an alternative to the classic instruments that, in part, I still own, but which no longer offer the reliability that the “old” synthesizers are no longer able to provide. They were already problematic back then, but there was nothing else available, so…

Now, tuning and performance stability are non-negotiable, and you can work in complete peace of mind. And having owned all those instruments that I now have in digital form, I can assure you they are far more reliable and absolutely identical to the originals. Sure, being able to physically touch the knobs, potentiometers, sliders when editing a sound or creating one from scratch… but then there are the Midi controllers that give back this emotion, so that... no regrets.

Plans for the future?

I have several plans for the future. They mainly concern Celeste, and then various aspects of my solo career. So Celeste already has its next project in the works, planned for releases for spring 2025. Then, also for Celeste, I'm working on reinterpreting some compositions taken from the albums ranging from “Principe di un giorno” to the most recent one before that, “Celeste With Celestial Symphony Orchestra,” reworking them with a Celtic harp and the full band lineup plus a few guests. The idea is to re-record everything, but with great care for the more delicate atmospheres, avoiding overloading the arrangements. So it'll be very ethereal, with the harp reinterpreting the various vocal lines and melodies. Very ambitious, but I can already feel it coming to life.

After that, a solo project of mine, due for September 2024: the second album in the "Absence Of Time" series, focused, like the previous one, on atmospheres devoted to meditation and psychophysical relaxation.

And for October 2024, the releases of the third volume of Il Sistema, titled "Uruk", part of the "Il Sistema Edition" series, drawn from my vast archive. Real gems! And then I'd also like to finally manage to finish preparing the second chapter of "Solare", which will be dedicated to the forgotten planets.

(4/8/2024)

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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text by Federico Romagnoli, 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.

Read the original in Italian · About the English edition

Celeste on OndaRock

Discography

CELESTE
Celeste [aka Principe di un giorno] (Grog, 1976)
Celeste II (archive material, Mellow, 1991)
I suoni di una sfera (archive material, Mellow, 1992)
Il risveglio del principe (Mellow, 2019)
Il principe del regno perduto (Mellow, 2020)
Celeste With Celestial Symphony Orchestra (Mellow, 2022)
Echoes of a Future Past (Mellow, 2024)
CIRO PERRINO
Solare (Ciao, 1980)
The New Electronics Company (Caravanning, 1986)
Classic Ensemble (with Antimo Serino and Tiziano Tavasanis, Team, 1987)
Far East (Mercury, 1990)
The Inner Garden (Inner Garden, 1992)
Disco Dance (with Tiziano Tavasanis, 1992)
Sport '92 (with Tiziano Tavasanis, 1992)
Moon In The Water (Inner Garden, 1994)
De rerum natura (Wea, 1997)
L'isola [Orchestral version] (Inner Garden, 2001)
L'isola [English version] (As, 2004)
L'isola [Small ensemble version] (As, 2006)
Piccole ali nel vento (Inner Garden, 2011)
Back Home (Inner Garden, 2016)
Planets (Mellow, 2019)
Kosmos (with Antimo Serino, Canopo, 2019)
Absence Of Time Vol. One (Mellow, 2022)