Deca - Scores for an Alien Orchestra

I meet Deca at the end of one of his many semi-improvised piano performances in unconventional locations. It's an event that has been repeating itself around the country for months now, riding the wave of the now widely celebrated piano album "Isole invisibili". Bookshops, art galleries… Wherever there's an instrument available, the Ligurian composer puts that unmistakable sound on display in its purest form, presenting himself in a guise that would have seemed almost unthinkable just a few years ago. In forty years of an honourable career, you can count his solo-piano live appearances on the fingers of one hand. After all, Deca waited until 2017 to finally put his piano repertoire down in black and white, after a myriad of productions that were markedly electronic and ambient, if not experimental.

A versatile (more than eclectic) and hugely accomplished artist, after an hour of thrilling impressionist and expressionist atmospheres on the keyboard, he chats with the audience, all smiles, and then with yours truly. I've been closely following his work for over twenty years, and I'm curious to learn more about the latest developments in his constant, never fully satisfied musical evolution.

The audience at your piano concerts seems different from the one that follows your electronic output. Or am I wrong?

I wouldn't say it's that different. If anything, it's wider, but it also includes the people who come to the electronic music concerts. The two strands aren't watertight compartments — quite the opposite… Interest in my music has simply broadened, because the piano is an instrument I'd now call "mass-market". And that's not a derogatory definition: it perfectly captures the fact that tonight's audience also included metalheads and families with children.

So you're confirming there's a continuity, even a contiguity, between the electronic side and the piano? For many, the album "Isole Invisibili" came across as a surprise, if not an outright break.

I can understand "surprise". Not "break". I think of the performance I put on in Florence last May, where I played almost an hour of improvisations on acoustic piano over a backdrop of electronic and noise textures. A perfect reconciliation between these two worlds. Which, as far as I'm concerned, are really the same world, interpreted through different musical instruments. And in any case, the use of piano isn't new even in my more synthetic works. Take "Angeli nel silenzio", for instance (from the album "Premonizione Humana", ed.), which people say is one of my most evocative and touching tracks. There, the piano is the protagonist, blended into a setting of cosmic sonorities. It closes an album whose very cover carries the words synthetic music.

In fact, quite a few of your more experimental pieces make room for the sound of piano. But in that context it's as if it gets contaminated by the genre label — a niche, elite kind of thing. It gets paired with synthesizers and computers, and perhaps to many listeners' ears it's as though its purity is being denatured.

Certainly the so-called purists, and not only them, turn their noses up if they don't have a broad, up-to-date musical background free of prejudice. Already back in the 1940s John Cage was searching for a new, diversified, experimental piano sound. Academic orthodoxy couldn't stand it. And that's despite the fact that Cage, at the time, wasn't even using electronics. But the culture of creativity moves forward, it transforms and transmutes, it doesn't stop to wonder what's orthodox or not, what's too disruptive given the unpreparedness of the audience and the critics. The essential nature of art in general is total freedom to express oneself, to manifest oneself. And also to be a mirror of the era it belongs to. Anyone today who points a finger at digital painting or at synthesized sound is showing a great fragility of thought.

It's a recurring fragility, throughout history. Every technical innovation put in the service of creativity has always been poorly tolerated at first, because it's read as a crutch for the less gifted and talented. For example, in the 19th century ready-made oil paint in tubes might have looked like a scandalous shortcut compared to having to mix your own chemical compounds. Yet without oil paint in tubes we wouldn't have had the Impressionists! And everything that followed from that.

Ah, of course! That's a fact that's repeated itself hundreds of times. The point is that, as time goes on, innovations have followed one another ever more rapidly. The march of technology has undergone an insane acceleration, so if there was intolerance and skepticism in the 19th century, just imagine in the last fifty or sixty years.

But getting back to the piano, then... How did the need to release an album like "Isole invisibili" come about? Could it be that someone might have interpreted it as an act of reconciliation, or even of redemption, precisely in light of your long, unconventional path, always one step ahead?

There was reconciliation, yes. With myself. I closed a circle that began back in the mid-70s, rediscovering the pleasure of playing piano with the aim of making an album I'd never managed to make before. Having a bunch of pieces ready for a long time, as well as the inspiration to write new ones, at a certain point along the way I think it was inevitable to pleasurably measure myself against the universal simplicity of piano sound. On the other hand, there was nothing calculated about it in terms of a potential audience, even though I was aware that with this kind of music you get a lot more attention than with experimental work.

Measuring yourself, if anything, on even riskier ground, though. Today's piano scene is absolutely packed with names you're quick to be compared to.

And that's exactly why I didn't set myself any goals in that regard. I didn't need to think there was an audience to seduce or please. I wasn't worried that my piano compositions might be likened to someone else's, or seen as derivative of long-established, famous pianists. After all, I haven't invented anything. I'd be a hypocrite if I denied the influence that masters like Wim Mertens, Harold Budd, and Ryuichi Sakamoto, to name a few, have had on me.

The universal simplicity of piano sound, as you called it a moment ago, also lends itself less to stamping a stylistic personality onto something. I mean, with your electronic productions you signed off on works that left their mark — a couple of your titles are often cited in lists of the most important and influential records in the history of ambient and industrial music. They've pinned this label on you, "Alchemist of Sound", which fits very well. With piano, maybe it's a deeper matter, one of writing, of technical solutions. The alchemy is less immediate.

Undoubtedly, if we're talking about sound. With piano, different emotional factors come into play. They're determined not by the sonorities and the complexity of the listening experience, as happens with electronic music, which is layered and extremely rich in timbre. On piano, the evocative dynamics — the ones that stir something inside you — run through different filters. Coming across as original, having a recognizable style of your own, being effective, is definitely harder and less immediate.

Is your usual output still moving forward, in any case? Or have you sacrificed every resource to the piano project, at least temporarily?

My non-piano output has undergone a mild scaling-back, but only an apparent one. I've kept working on other projects that, not having come out yet, might give the impression of an absolute monopoly by the piano phase. An album credited to Psycho Kinder is about to come out, for instance, for which I wrote and produced all the musical parts. It's an album that's definitely rooted in ambient and industrial, although it also includes a couple of very short electric piano pieces. Besides, the research work in my home studio could never come to a halt. I'm constantly at work with samplers and synthesizers, vocal processing and whatever else. I record and archive everything, because everything stays in service of future ideas. Creating new sounds and sublimating them into new compositions is an experience that never gets old. For me it's a calling. I've been doing it almost non-stop for nearly three decades now.

Ride the wave of great music

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