Enrico Falbo - Between Earth and Sky, on the Trail of the Remote

A precious musician stubbornly far from the spotlight, Enrico Falbo continues his search for a music perpetually suspended between the ancestral nature of an earthy folk and the ineffability of “sonic-shamanic” formulas steeped in cosmic abandon. With three albums of strong personality, “Sylvan Songs” (2010), “Tranceformer” (2017) and the very recent “De-Stare” (which we'll discuss in more depth in an upcoming article), the musician and composer from Benevento has established himself as one of the best-kept secrets of Italian music, thanks to a sonic synthesis that tries to sing of “the powerlessness of power over Truth” and the “necessity of the Path of Day” 

What follows is a summary of a very long chat I had the pleasure of having with Enrico, sipping coffee in the shade of a small suburban bar and discussing music (Western and Eastern), philosophy (from Parmenides to Severino, by way of Thomas Aquinas, Spinoza and Hegel), ancient rituals and plenty of other wonders.

Enrico, to break the ice, would you like to tell us how you first approached music, and what were the first instruments that sparked your imagination?

It all began back in 1985. I was four years old, and one lovely afternoon my father came to pick me up from nursery school to give me a surprise: he'd bought a Schneider “tower” hi-fi system, maybe one of the first models with a CD player, cassette deck, turntable, radio… it was taller than I was, but I immediately learned all its functions and started listening to Sixties/Seventies vinyl (Battisti, Le Orme, Aphrodite’s Child, Guccini, Nomadi, Equipe 84, Formula Tre, Beatles, Pink Floyd, and so on…). I'd spend whole afternoons listening to music, almost in a trance! Eventually my father gave me the “task” of dubbing all the vinyl records onto cassette (back then he only had one CD, maybe a James Last one!) so he could listen to them in the car! He really trusted me with that! I remember there were two instruments at home: a Farfisa organ and a 1969 Eko Rangers 12-string. I loved its sound, so rich in resonance and depth, I'd call it “orchestral”! It was stolen in the Nineties, but later recovered thanks to some “strange coincidences”! In the 2000s a dear friend of mine, a luthier, restored and amplified it! It's the only guitar I used on my latest album! When I was in middle school, one day a young substitute teacher walked into the classroom, a bit shy: he introduced himself quietly while we were all messing around, barely paying attention; then he pulled his weapon of choice out of its case: a classical guitar, and started playing it in the most stunning way! He held us spellbound for about an hour, like little charmed snakes… then he told us a bit about the instrument and about music! The next day, we all showed up with guitars in class! From that day on, I never stopped… I ventured into music following a long, broad and “non-linear” path. I could tell you many other anecdotes from my childhood and adolescence, events I could read as crucial, decisive, or as irrelevant and of little consequence. Some memories are sharp, vivid images, others a bit faded… and yet every small occurrence shows the necessity of every event in my life (“musical” and otherwise)!

If I remember correctly, in the early 2000s you played in a few rock outfits: Lamia, Chaos Conspiracy and Il cielo di Baghdad. Would you like to look back on that period a bit?

Back then there was a lot of musical ferment in the Sannio area: the “Six Day Sonic Madness” at the castle in Guardia Sanframondi, the Depistaggio social centre, the Morgana Music Club in Benevento were genuine cult venues for the national underground music scene and beyond. I started out with several rock outfits. The Lamia is a “witch”, a seductress of dual nature (“half woman, half serpent”), who inspired myths and legends from classical and medieval times, the Romantic poet John Keats, and the wonderful track by Genesis on the extraordinary album “The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway”. With Lamia we released two EPs (“Lamia” in 2005 and “Eufonia” in 2006), and ended up among the winners of Rock Targato Italy (2007) and Sanremo Rock (2006); we played a kind of twilight rock, influenced by Radiohead, Cure, Joy Division, At The Drive In, Seventies Italian prog rock, and so on… With Michele Intorcia (bass), Giulio Cestrone (guitar) and Marco Boscaino (drums), the musical collaboration still continues today, right up to my latest album “De-Stare”. With Chaos Conspiracy, a post-hardcore/mathcore outfit, we released our first album (“Out of Place”) around the same years for the British label Copro Records. Back then I was listening to a lot of metal (Sepultura, Soulfly, Emperor, Meshuggah, Death, Slipknot, Type O Negative, Carcass). Then I got into post-rock: Sigur Ros, Mogwai, Godspeed You! Black Emperor. From 2009 to 2012, thanks to a friendship born precisely at music festivals, I found myself playing viola, guitar and harmonium with the “band” (there were six of us!) Il Cielo di Bagdad, touring quite a bit around the most notable indie-rock festivals and clubs on the Italian scene of those years. I remember those times very fondly, full of enthusiasm and creativity, with a healthy dose of madness and not much “calculating thought”.

Which artists (not only musicians) have influenced you the most?

The following musicians have certainly inspired many aspects of my attitude and approach to music: Jim Morrison, Klaus Schulze, Lou Reed, Nico, John Cale, Tony Conrad, Angus Mclise, La Monte Young, Pandit Pran Nath, Arvo Part, Henryk Gorecky, Giacinto Scelsi, Florian Fricke, Thom Yorke, Franco Battiato, Lucio Battisti; as painters, Odilon Redon, Kandinsky, Gino De Dominicis; Aldous Huxley, William Blake, Rilke as writers; Kenneth Anger, Alejandro Jodorowsky, John Carpenter, Werner Herzog, Sergei Parajanov as filmmakers. Despite the differences in personality and the very different styles, in all of the above I've found the same “call”, the same “Resonance”.

In 2010, you finally arrived at your first solo recording, “Sylvan Songs”, an album I'm very fond of. Those grooves were marked by a sound shot through with ancestral tensions and arcane shades, in the vein of a psychic immersion into the beautiful landscapes of your home region. What led you, from your early rock infatuations, in that new direction?

I'm glad you really appreciated my first album “Sylvan Songs”, self-produced and self-recorded between 2008 and 2010, in harmony and consonance with the “oracular response” of the woods, the sunsets, the dawns, and the eternal, “invisible” glow of my home region of Sannio. Benevento, the ancient Samnite Maleventum, is today a small city, but it's rich in history, in artefacts and monuments of considerable importance, in legends and cults, from the Romans to the Lombards, to the Christian saints (the relics of Saint Bartholomew, Saint Januarius was born in Benevento, Saint Benedict of Benevento, Saint Barbatus, the hermit Saint Mennas, Saint Giuseppe Moscati, Saint Pio of Pietrelcina, etc.); but it's also, and above all, the city of the “witches”, of the Walnut Tree, of the cults of Isis, Hecate, Artemis, and of the Janare who, according to popular belief, anointed their skin with a “magic” ointment in order to fly to the Sabbath in the valley of the Sabato river. Legends aside, it's a territory that has, as Elémire Zolla would put it, an unmistakable, unique and mysterious “Aura”, which has certainly fed my sonic roots and my inspiration for an “other” kind of music, mysterious, straining toward an ancestral folk, an orphic sound, frenzied and dreamlike, accompanied by a voice made of “sonic-shamanic” formulas, invoking the dawn from the dark forests, from the clearings lost among the “rocks and bodiless woods”, as Rilke wrote.

You have a degree in philosophy. How has your love for what is “clear and luminous”, to borrow Emanuele Severino's phrase, influenced your music?

Philosophy, born in the 6th century BC, made possible today's “civilisation of technology” and all the institutions and works of the West. Nowadays it's considered something outdated, useless chatter, and yet “philosophy is humanity's inevitable future, technology is its present”. That sentence from the master Emanuele Severino has stayed etched in my heart. Philosophy, in its deep etymological meaning (“sophia” comes from “saphes”, clear and luminous), is a “shedding light onto the Light”, that is, onto the “undeniable Truth”, beyond “myth”, “faiths”, “opinions”, “common sense”, the “probabilistic hypotheses” of science, all of which are dimensions of “doxa”, that is, of “non-truth”. Severino's entire body of thought sheds light on the unconscious of Western civilisation, from its origins in ancient Greece to the “not-so-distant” future of “paradisiac-technological” perfection (ever more likely!): the unconscious of our civilisation is nihilism, the mad faith that nothingness (the impossible!) exists, and that things, that is, beings, are “becoming”, “annihilable”, “fleeting”, “ephemeral”, destined to be lost, “oscillating between being and nothingness”. The lyrics of my songs are just “hints”, but they do draw on these ideas too. For me it's becoming harder and harder to separate and distinguish music from philosophy: one somehow resonates within the other! Indeed, there is no “specific” language for bearing witness to truth! Empedocles, Xenophanes and Parmenides (the latter wrongly considered by Nietzsche to be a cold, abstract, rationalist philosopher) wrote their works in verse: “Peri Physeos”. Severino later regarded Aeschylus and Leopardi as great philosophers too. Music, too, in my view, can be the place where the “Destiny of Truth” and of Necessity bear witness to themselves! My music draws on the “Remote”, while still being a child of the “time” and the “land” in which I've lived, but it belongs neither to the West nor to the East: it abandons the impassable “path of night”, the winning persuasions of the Apparatus, “nihilism”, and sings of power's impotence over Truth, the “necessity” of the Path of Day, that is, the sunset of alienation, of domination, of pain and anguish caused by the unpredictability of becoming and by “philodoxy” (which seems ever more celebrated than “philosophy”), and by the “impossible” removal of Truth, “which neither gods nor men can deny”, as Severino himself liked to say!

Over the years you've developed a real passion for more unusual instruments, especially ones from India. What fascinates you about that sound world, and what can it still teach us in the West — and in particular, the world of “rock”?

Great innovations, to paraphrase Jankélévitch, don't come from chasing novelty at all costs — in fact they exclude it! They often come from contact with archaic musical traditions. From Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Glinka, from La Monte Young to Popol Vuh, by way of Faust and Dead Can Dance: they've all drawn from the wellsprings of primordial sound, from the melodic formulas of millennia-old musical traditions. The musician innovates in a sense radically different from the inventor! Indian classical music will always have a great deal to teach a musician of any genre: first and foremost, “ek-stasis”, that is, stepping outside one's ordinary, everyday ego, one's “worldly self-exaltation”, in order to feel like a “cosmic resonator”, thus opening oneself up to a renewed listening to the “Resonance of the Remote”, which is a world away from the consumeristic, conformist, frivolous, generic, standardised non-listening that seems to be spreading with ever more force, violence and efficiency across the whole contemporary world by now. I love Indian bowed instruments a great deal, like the Dilruba, Esraj and Sarangi, perhaps less well known than the sitar or the tanpura. They're very evocative instruments, with anywhere from 15 to 30 sympathetic strings. For several years now I've been deepening my study of ragas and of the sound world of Indian music with Maestra Mano Manjarie (a student of the great violinist R. Rajam) and Maestro Paolo Avanzo (a student of the great sitarist Shivnath Mishra), one of the first in Italy.

“Tranceformer”, your second album, was released in 2017, a full seven years after your debut. Why did you let so much time pass?

The music kept digging deep, flowing silently but slowly, working its way through narrow fissures; then, suddenly, it burst forth from underground springs, and it was the “Day of the ecstatic call” (the title of one of my tracks)! “Tranceformer” was released by the American label Vulpiano Records, a wonderful collective of really interesting musicians (more than a classic record label), thanks to Marylin Roxie, who did the artwork and produced the video for “Trance-Forme”. Attilio Novellino, among the most original composers of electroacoustic and drone-ambient music in Italy, added the finishing touch, handling the mastering and unifying the sessions into a single track.

Having left ancestral folk behind, with “Tranceformer” you created a fascinating mix of cosmic and ambient-tribal music. What pushed you to change course? What were you listening to during those seven years?

A lot of "Drone" music and music tied to ecstatic or trance rituals from India and other parts of the world. Thanks to my dear friend, the Sannite anthropologist and researcher who studied in India for decades, Aldo Colucciello (whom I miss dearly today!), I got to know many musical ritual traditions from India and from central-southern Italy. After countless conversations, readings and experiences, I came to understand more clearly that what fascinates me most - and unsettles me most - about Music isn't so much its aesthetic dimension, but its "ecstatic dimension". My path keeps moving further in this "remote", dissonant direction, distant from the spirit and trends of my time. I consider "Tranceformer" my first "trance" ritual, recorded in a single unified flow of six live sessions, using a Loopstation, Indian instruments processed through delay/reverb, tribal percussion, electric guitars and synthesizers. I drew inspiration from cosmic music and the krautrock of Faust and Popol Vuh, but also from the drone music of Tony Conrad and Angus Maclise.

Let's talk about "De-Stare", your latest work, which in some ways seems to sit between "Sylvan Songs" and "Tranceformer". Tell us a bit about the genesis of these new tracks.

One day, out of nowhere, I found myself writing the lyrics for the track "Aure", as if under dictation. I hadn't written songs since my time with Lamia, so in a way I went back to my sonic roots. Compared to "Sylvan Songs" and "Tranceformer", "De-Stare" is sung in Italian, with lyrics I consider "traces", hints and connections of my "philosophical-metaphysical" path. In the end, I played the tracks for Dylan Iuliano, a young Sannite composer of electro-acoustic music, visionary and hugely talented. "De-Stare", in fact, came out on his label Bulbless Records, which also released "Lick the Witch", a compilation gathering a full 30 years of Sannite electronic music, music that has "leapt beyond its borders".

The first thing that struck me, sharing as I do your passion for Severino, is the title "De-Stare", which recalls the "De-stino" [Destiny] of the philosopher from Brescia. Can you explain it to us?

Exactly, you've hit the nail on the head: of course, Severino's language is very evocative, quite difficult, very rigorous, but poorly understood and consequently misunderstood, in my view, even by eminent philosophers and scientists. "De-Stare", in Latin, is the intensive-iterative form of the verb "stare" [to stand/be] and denotes the "authentic standing" of Truth, "the eternity of every entity". Truth understood as Destiny, according to Severino, is not epistemic truth as understood by past philosophy and modern science ("epi-steme" = the hyperuranian "standing above" of the "immutable laws" that dominate the reality of becoming), but is the "standing at the heart of things", of every event, of all entities, even at the heart of those who reject Truth. Destiny, in this sense, expresses a meaning unheard of for Western civilization (and beyond!): it is not at all the fatalism of Stoicism, nor the determinism of classical physics (e.g. where a given past state necessarily "produces" a given future state), nor the probabilistic indeterminism of quantum physics, nor divine providence, nor the passive acceptance of Eastern mysticism (even "non-action" is a form of action; even Yoga requires a "technique" to trans-form the mortal self into the divine Self). Becoming, in fact, implies nothingness (that is, an impossible content): for an entity to become another entity, to be in a state of becoming, to "trans-form" itself, it must no longer be what it was before - and moreover, in an absolute sense! Indeed, any imperceptible transformation implies the absolute "non-being" of certain aspects (entities). In this sense, truth as "Destiny" must not be "im-posed" on becoming, since becoming simply "is-not". Since becoming is NOT, then any "will to control it" is Madness! Just as it is madness for someone to build a raft to "tame" ("episteme" = the "prow of domination", as Severino reminds us) the waters, sailing on a river that does not exist! All of this resonates, in some way, with my conception of "Drone-music", where the flow of sound is precisely a De-Stare, "intensive-iterative", not a nihilistic flux or an "eternal return of the same" (Nietzsche), but one where only "the immutable can become", in a "sonic" sense.

In these new tracks of yours I've also heard echoes of artists such as Alan Sorrenti, the most evocative side of Battiato, but also Giovanni Lindo Ferretti. Am I hallucinating, or are my ears still working fine?

Yes, certainly, the more kraut and "mystery-laden" Battiato of "Sulle Corde di Aries" or the Ferretti of CSI's "Gothic Line", but also the PGR of "Montesole", are deep influences. As for Alan Sorrenti, I love his masterpiece "Aria", though I couldn't tell you if it was a "direct" reference on these tracks.

In the case of the track "AION", how did the collaboration with Forever Alien come about - if I'm not mistaken, another musician from the Benevento area?

We're great friends and we've shared a huge amount of music and visions about music, during a wonderful period when we lived, together with other friends, half as dazed hippies and half as excitable madmen, on our "musical farm", surrounded by greenery, amid endless wheat fields in the Benevento countryside. Johnny Jay (Pedicini) has been living in Edinburgh for about ten years now and is still very musically active, like a "magma"! He continues down his electronic path, inspired by Psychic TV and Swans. "Aion" grew out of a bassline by Michele Intorcia, but Johnny reworked the whole thing with modular synthesizers and added rather dark, spectral vocals.

Speaking of the Benevento scene, are there other musicians you feel particularly close to?

Besides the already mentioned Dylan Iuliano ("The Delay In The Universal Loop") and Forever Alien, I greatly admire Max Fuschetto for his original musical synthesis. Also very interesting, as far as the current Sannite music scene goes, are Unruly Girls and Faintin' Goats.

I'd love to know what your favorite records are, or in any case the ones that had a decisive weight in your musical evolution.

Let me name just a few that I consider not simply "records", but true "portals" beyond space-time: "Tabula Rasa" by Arvo Part, "Irrlicht" by Klaus Schulze; "Dreamweapon" and "The Invasion of Thunderbolt Pagoda" by Angus Maclise, "In den Gärten Pharaos", "Hosianna Mantra" and "Die Nacht Der Seele /Tantric Songs" by Popol Vuh; "Midnight: Raga Malkauns" by Pandit Pran Nath, much of the discography of the collective The Theatre of Eternal Music; "Outside the Dream Syndicate" by Tony Conrad with Faust; "Their Refinement Of The Decline" and "The Tired Sounds of..." by Stars Of The Lid; "Desertshore" by Nico; "Songs from the Hill" and "Dolmen Music" by Meredith Monk, "Going Places" by Yellow Swans, "Sulle corde di Aries" by Franco Battiato; among "contemporary" musician-shamans, I can't help but mention Vibracathedral Orchestra, Godspeed You! Black Emperor, Yellow Swans, Natural Snow Buildings, Six Organs of Admittance, Fursaxa, Grouper.

How does one of your tracks usually come about? Is there something in particular that inspires you?

It's hard to describe that "arising" and those "necessary connections", to borrow Severino's language, but I really can't find better words! The words, the song titles and the sound of my latest record express, above all else, hints and connections to the most esoteric metaphysics and mysticism. The track "Sentiero del Giorno", for example, musically revisits the proem of Parmenides' "Peri Physeos" (On Nature) - the father of Western metaphysics, whom Plato called "venerable and terrible" and whom Aristotle described as the most mad among philosophers. It tells of a mysterious, dreamlike journey (perhaps a "lucid dream"?) on a chariot, drawn by two immortal mares and guided by the Sun Nymphs (the Heliades). At dawn, having left the Houses of Night behind, the chariot races swiftly toward the Gate dividing the two paths (of night and day), emitting from its axle and wheels "a hissing sound", an "organ-like sound" - a magical sound, full of resonances, I'd call it a hypnotic "drone", immersed in choirs of female voices that expand the cosmic portal. I tried, then, to translate that journey into sonic terms with the drone of the Indian Tanpura, with a brief hint of melody from a nocturnal Indian raga played on the Dilruba, with driving percussion and female choruses (recorded by my wife Francesca), layering in other ethereal, expansive, cosmic sounds! The single "Dimore" evokes a remote place, far from time and space. "Dimora" [Abode/Dwelling] is a word and symbol dear to Christian female mystics, "beside themselves" in burning spiritual ecstasy (Teresa of Ávila, Edith Stein), as well as to mysterious alchemists (Fulcanelli), to wise "inner explorers" (Ramana Maharshi) and to remote metaphysicians. It's a track I dedicated to Western man, to myself as a "wanderer" and a "mortal", destined for sunset, yet forever saved from nothingness! It's hard to imagine that the straight "path" through this desolate land isn't laid out by some God, by Gods, by Men (servants or powerful lords), and that a destination doesn't await us out there beyond ourselves; hard to think (especially for Western man) that Destiny is not an artifice or the product of some "doing", nor of free choice, nor of human resignation. Certainly, it is arduous to "bear witness to Destiny" beyond any dogmatic faith, opinion or hypothesis - to know, that is, that in the "Labyrinthine Dwellings of spiritual gold", symbol of eternal Glory and of an unshakeable, firmest Truth, we, together with all "things", beyond any anguish, pain, emptiness, fall, domination or "will to power", have always necessarily been free! The track "Aure" comes from another word, forgotten or lost in the semantic Babel of New Age culture, but which in Sanskrit is "Sri", meaning precisely "Splendor", "Glory", "Enchantment". One of the last seekers of "auras", Elémire Zolla, reminded us that all things have an Aura - from the sun to the mountains, to flowers, to human faces, to animals and trees, from the most beautiful and luminous experiences to terrifying, tragic, dark events, to "strange" coincidences and synchronicities. The vision of the Aura is, I daresay, a kind of awakening, a "stirring" into a dimension where every presumed link of "cause and effect" collapses (a bit like in the subatomic quantum world), and where, in its own way - even to the "non-philosophical" eye - the mutual eternity and necessity of the part and the Whole is revealed. "Aura" is, for me, that eternal glow of every scene, every nuance, every light and shadow experienced in everyday life and, at the same time, in the infinite "De-Stare" of eternal "supraconscious" states. The "solar Auras" are, in my musical metaphor, an infinity of concentric sonic circles, a reverberating overlay of sounds that gradually open up and attune the finite to the Infinite!

All this was a source of inspiration for "De-Stare".

Have you had the chance to take your music on the road, projecting it, so to speak, into a "live" dimension?

Only on rare occasions. Sure, I'd love to play live: right now I'm putting together a live set on my own, but also with some very dear musician friends (Michele Intorcia, Giulio Cestrone, Luigi Limongelli of the synth-punk duo Unruly Girls) to present the album "De-Stare" live in Benevento at the end of July. It would be wonderful to play in the Elea-Velia archaeological park in Cilento, or at Camposauro on Taburno, or near the Ponte Appiano over the Calore river: evocative places, full of remote Resonances!

What are your plans for the future? Will we have to wait many more years before hearing a new album from you?

I'd love to know myself, but I couldn't give you an answer to that. What's certain is that I play a lot, I live surrounded by instruments, and music is - and I know it will always be - omnipresent.

Ride the wave of great music

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