Gigi Masin - The castaway in an ocean of wonder

(To Alessio Magenta, who revealed to me the Masin microcosm)

“Elegance is not about being noticed, but about being remembered,” declared designer Giorgio Armani, tersely; proof of that statement is embodied, in the musical realm, by the recording career of Gigi Masin, another great Italian whose output, once discovered, cannot help but leave a radiant memory in the listener devoted to high quality. The author of instrumental albums in which electronic and electroacoustic elements join forces to move the mind through softness that never turns saccharine, he also boasts a live career spent on stages across half the world, along with internationally renowned collaborations with the crème of contemporary IDM and ambient.

Only Italy, go figure, keeps him confined within the ranks of cult composers, remembering him mainly for having been sampled, without his knowledge, by Björk, on “It’s In Our Hands”, a song included on her 2002 “Greatest Hits”, which in turn actually lifted a sample from Berlin's To Rococo Rot (the track “Die Dinge Des Lebens”), who themselves had lifted it from Masin's own “Clouds”, featured on the dreamlike split with England's Charles Hayward, “Les Nouvelles Musiques De Chambre V. 2” (1989).

Born in Venice in 1955, Gigi was a young man who dreamed of becoming a radio announcer, a pursuit he settled into at eighteen. Working as a technician for the theatre and blown away by his first listens to Ligeti and Penderecki, he began putting together stage music and proper compositions, using a turntable and an old Teac reel-to-reel recorder; a job later came along at RAI's Venice studios, where he experimented with Studer recorders, gradually shaping a personal style. In 1986 he self-released his debut LP in a run of a few hundred copies, that “Wind” which today fetches astronomical sums on the collector's market; listening to the song “Call Me” – where the author's own voice appears, not unlike the gravelly tone of latter-day Chris Rea – and “The Sea Of Sands”, respectively the first and last tracks of the collection, reveals a palette of colours miraculously handled by the Korg P-800, which paints constellations of astonishing expressiveness into thin air. It marks the start of a career now nearing its fortieth year, rich with original and thoroughly enjoyable artistic statements, a body of work evoked without intellectualism that speaks a universal language, perfectly summed up in one overused but, here, entirely truthful word: “Beauty”.

Gigi, your compositional approach works by subtraction. What artistic need does taking things away satisfy for you?

The real question is: what do you actually have on hand? When I started making music I didn't have much, because buying electronic gear 40 years ago was tough going. Today, for 50 quid you can download software that emulates anything. Back then you had to buy a synth, which was no small expense. I owned just the bare essentials; around the time of “Wind” someone gave me a used synth and I started having fun with it. Since I started out as a guitarist rather than a keyboard player, for me it was first and foremost a form of play. And even though years have passed and I've built up experience, my approach has stayed the same. When I'm at home, I don't practise on the piano; when I play, I simply play what I feel.

Your style is often built on acoustic sounds, thanks in part to the use of horns and, above all, piano. Who influenced your piano playing?

A few miles from where we are now (Vicenza, ed.), I once saw a concert by jazz musician Paul Bley, a man of incredible simplicity and beauty. I remember he was wearing one sock of one colour and one of another. He told me: “Don't rehearse, just play what you feel. And if you make a few mistakes… even better!”. A perfect approach for me. Not having a classical training behind me, I certainly can't do Keith Jarrett, but I can draw out a sound or a chord that moves me and represents who I am. Whether it's luck or instinct, I don't know, maybe a crossing of fortuitous elements. You ask about influences. In my formative years I listened a lot to Weather Report. Later I came across Abdullah Ibrahim and Chris McGregor, with their South African jazz. People you later discover aren't particularly well known but who make you think: what on earth are they playing?! Then you enter an entirely singular world, realising you have to stop worrying about it and just play what's already resonating inside you. You mustn't chase after other people's visions. When I played guitar there were people telling me I should move closer to the style of Pat Metheny, while I had figures like John Martyn and Nick Drake in mind.

Those last two names I wouldn't have suspected among your formative listening.

I remember birthday parties where I'd play “Suite: Judy Blue Eyes” by Stephen Stills on guitar, using an open tuning I'd learned to master by staying up all night, while people around me kept asking me to play De André. And I'd reply, “De André is a copycat, I'm not interested”, and everyone else would come down on me for it.

How do you learn to tell substantial ambient music apart from fluff?

That's a question that should really be put to the journalists writing the reviews. Sometimes you read reviews that make you doubt whether the person who wrote them actually listened to the record. I understand that critics need to establish degrees of value and authenticity to justify their role, but that's mostly a survival tactic which, as a listener, I don't pay much attention to. I know for a fact that there are artists, even fairly well-regarded ones, who use some run-of-the-mill Russian software to take a piece of classical music, pitch it down several times, drench it in reverb, and vary it here and there. What comes out is beyond anything you could imagine. I've got software like that myself, on my old iPad 2. Look, there are different methods and attitudes when it comes to approaching ambient as composers; the fact remains that if a piece moves you, it's music: everything else is marketing. In pop just as in ambient or jazz. There are sounds that can deceive, I get that. But that all comes down to the listener's sensibility.

In your view, which album by another artist comes closest to the idea of perfection?

“Mysterious Traveller” by Weather Report. An incredible manifesto of global music. It's not just jazz, but boasts Zawinul's all-encompassing vision, embraced by incredible musicians, South American rhythms, all held together with a capacity for fusing so many elements that is nothing short of fantastic.

What are the qualities of music you simply can't stand?

I find it really hard to listen to the new Italian rap scene, even though I have twin 19-year-old sons who have a little corner in their bedroom with a microphone where they produce rap tracks using loops. Right now, they're the only ones who don't pay to use my loops. But the stylistic approach, with all the swearing, the way women get degraded, all the talk of guns and stuff like that... I've had enough of that! At least American gangsta rap had a musical taste that was frightening in its power. They really had it inside them, for the most part. Don't get me wrong: there are worthwhile productions in Italy too, it's just that the “sono un bandito/ sono una carogna/ spaccio droga” attitude tends to dominate. The problem is that kids don't understand that those concepts imply a very specific way of being: and after listening to this stuff, it's not like they actually go rob a bank or deal drugs, so they end up, without realizing it, wearing an attitude of falseness. They love a music that, ultimately, is fake to them, because what it tells you isn't something you'd actually put into practice. When I think about the lyrics of Van Morrison, well, I was completely in tune with what he was singing.

Now a question that usually annoys the people I interview.

I'm an Inter fan, I can put up with anything.

Is there a distinction between music that's pure craftsmanship and music that's art? Maybe a Litfiba album falls into the first category, and one by Iggy & The Stooges into the second.

First of all, we have to respect every form of musical expression. Even though I'm not a fan of Litfiba, you have to understand how hard it is for a band to make a living from music and playing live in Italy. The problem is that, precisely because we're Italian, we come from a refined culture, and that works against us. England, by contrast, is a much rougher, wilder, more brutal land. We too have been cruel throughout our history, but over there was a kind of poverty that, in some areas, still exists today. You'll say: but we have places like Scampia, for instance. But as tough as it is, it's not a neighborhood as frightening as some outlying areas of England, which bring out in the people who live there a rage and a grit we simply don't know here. That's the darkest kind of poverty, with no horizon in sight. Here, there's always a horizon. If you really want to find a job here, you can find one, even if it means cleaning stairwells or delivering pizzas. The same goes for America, another brutal country. The relationship between white people and people of color is still terrible there. We visit New York and think that's the United States; having toured the country extensively to play shows, I can assure you America isn't the way the movies tell us it is. We rib each other over North versus South or over rival football fan bases, but it ends there. We remain a country with obvious softness, lucky, if you like, with mothers who still cook for their kids, you know what I mean? Ours is a pacified country, where you might find a sausage festival and decide to go there with friends. What do they have in America? McDonald's. And when there isn't one? Emptiness. All these differences are reflected in the approach to making music.

What are the reasons the Italian system keeps us stuck in an unhealthy provincialism?

It's a country that mainly brings out the "yes man", because its management has to stay centralized. The idea never takes hold that our differences, put together, could have nuclear power. That's why talented young people leave here and never come back. The way Italy is run seems specifically designed to prevent the spread of the culture virus. As for television and print media, well, let's not even go there. Let's compare an Italian morning TV show with one from the BBC: here it's just cooks, third-rate celebrities and illnesses, while in England you might get a science documentary about specific issues of pre-adolescence. It's certainly a situation that will change: Italian history is made of ups and downs. Right now we're in a down phase. It's not that other countries don't have their share of chancers, but here there's no clear political direction; amid the general failure of Italian politics, there's a lack of freedom given to individual places to do things. What's missing is the spirit that leads you to look ahead with a sense of planning, to understand that every aspect of society matters; giving space to the multitude of voices present in the country is a fundamental part of healthy coexistence. That's a task not just for people who love music, but also for people who have nothing to do with it, yet who are in a position to set a clear direction. I'm not saying England doesn't have talented young people struggling to emerge; but here, emerging is basically forbidden by design.

Don't you recognize some blame on the audience's part? A concert in Italy, say, by Robert Rich, will probably draw a hundred people; the same concert in Sweden will draw a thousand.

No. That's fine as it is. If you, as an organizer, have to start, you have to start from somewhere. The problem lies further upstream; you need to figure out whether you're willing to invest money and create problems for yourself in that sense, and if so, you deserve great respect. You can't book an Italian composer who performs all over the world for a festival and tell him "200 euros is a good price for you", and then offer another composer, a foreign one, 15,000.

Your vocal delivery on the opening track of "Wind", "Call Me", reveals a timbre of real depth. Which voices spark your interest?

Take away Crosby Stills & Nash, John Martyn and Nick Drake, and I'm nothing. Martyn is the one who said: this is folk, but not only that, there's jazz in it, there's Jamaica in it, and in saying so he opens up a whole world for you. Drake is convoluted and simple at the same time, something unreachable that still resonates as a signal to everyone else; a signal that you can express yourself that way too, bringing out the demons you carry inside. These days even traffic lights have heard of Drake, but back then he was a discovery only a few people made. I remember a time when music mattered so much in our lives that you'd get a phone call at two in the morning from a friend, just to ask: "Do you have that Miles Davis album I could borrow?"

Is the great affliction music suffers from today rooted in the death of curiosity?

Let's say people are led to seek novelty only in one particular direction.

Among your many collaborations, I'd like a word on three projects in particular: the first is "Red Hair Girl At Lighthouse Beach" from 2023, a split album with Rod Modell.

He's done a lot of work with Silentes, the admirable label run by that admirable man Stefano Gentile, from Vittorio Veneto. Rod makes incredible music, which didn't click with me at first, but I kept thinking he had a great mind. Rod knew my work well and I knew his; once Stefano had confirmed our mutual interest in working together, his idea was to produce two tracks: one of my pieces remixed by Rod, and one of his remixed by me.

Then there's the album with pianist Greg Foat, "Dolphins" ('23), marked by elegant sonorities close to jazz.

Greg has given me great satisfaction. Initially we were supposed to record at his studio on the Isle of Wight, but then, because of lockdown, we had to work remotely. We did two really beautiful concerts for keyboards, piano, bass and drums, maybe even more beautiful than the record.

Finally, the trio Gaussian Curve: musically speaking, what are the main qualities of the other two members, Jonny Nash and Marco Sterk, respectively?

Now they're two friends of mine. We met in 2014; it was Tako Reyenga, from the Music From Memory label, who suggested we collaborate. So he set us up with a small studio in an apartment in the center of Amsterdam: it was Friday afternoon. By Sunday evening we'd recorded our debut, "Clouds". These things happen. I had in mind that white American sound, something like Steely Dan, cool if you like, but one that knows how to respect Black music, jazz, r'n'b. A kind of composed coolness that's never glacial. The second record with them, "The Distance" ('17), is in fact much more American. We'd gone to play in Australia as support for the American DJ Larry Heard, an incredible experience; we arrived in Sydney and played in a park packed with people who applauded not between one song and the next, but in the spaces between one silence and the next. Then we went to Melbourne, where I opened solo for half an hour, and afterwards Gaussian Curve played. At the end of the show people came up to us with little thank-you notes they'd written in Italian. "Welcome!" "Thank you". "Great music". A success that made us think: do you really have to go to Australia to get that kind of recognition? To close the circle, we'd like to put out a third album.

A question that splits composers into idealists and pragmatists: is the process more important, or the result?

Hard to say, because the process already tells you what the result will be. Here's an example. You have to prepare a concert alongside someone who hasn't been on stage in a while, and you notice he's struggling and doesn't understand that what he should do is get out of the way and just stick to the keyboard, letting the others work on the energy. You can already tell the shows will be good, but not spine-tingling. Other times, though, you get to the studio with kids like Marco and Jonny and you joke around together, in harmony: if you keep it friendly and everyone leaves their ego at the door, it's guaranteed to be a great experience, and you'll be able to build something.

A personal form of minimalism is an integral part of your approach. Why do we love repetition?

It's a genre that challenges your capacity for listening, because your brain says "I've already heard this part", but then it realizes that, meanwhile, a slight change has happened, and again, and again. Minimalism strikes your sensitive side, because it's music built on a precise mathematical theory. If you listen to Steve Reich, you'll witness an extremely slow progression, and your senses too get called into question. If I had to complain about actual repetition, though, I'd point to certain singer-songwriters who risk giving us diseases we don't even have names for yet. That's a kind of repetition that weighs us down. Minimalism, on the other hand, is fire. Think of certain composers, often underrated, from the Belgian and Dutch scene... I'm talking, for instance, about Wim Mertens, an exceptional pianist who nowadays is even being copied by a figure as lovable as Nils Frahm. There are countless musicians who changed the course of music and yet remain forgotten. Another formidable name is Harold Budd.

Brian Eno?

I don't love him that much. Simply because he's always attached himself to other people's talent. A bit like David Bowie, who kept company with the crème of the American intelligentsia, so as to always stay on the crest of the wave.

Playing live: what are the worst situations a musician should hope never to run into?

Big theaters, where the biggest jerks in the business work as sound techs, who, even though they speak English, prefer to address you in their own language, just to put you on the spot. Then you play the show and it goes fine anyway, but meanwhile you're thinking to yourself: "I'd have been better off staying home". The sound tech is a crucial figure, because he's the medium/the means through which you, through the music, relate to the audience. Often underpaid people who do this job mainly out of passion. But sometimes you're given people who act as if you were the one supposed to be playing for them.

Promoters?

During an event, they're generally frazzled.

Your relationship with other musicians?

Some artists, before and after a show, shut themselves away in the dressing room. And then I wonder: why do this job at all, if you're just going to lock yourself in? People can tell whether you actually want to play for them or not.

In an era of contamination at all costs, your sound has evolved while staying fundamentally consistent.

I have to admit I've also taken part in collaborations that didn't go well, maybe because I wasn't given the space I thought I deserved, or because the other musicians wouldn't listen to the advice I felt I had to offer. But they're all experiences you learn something from, and you should be grateful for them regardless. Aside from that, I'm a musician like any other, someone who starts from the assumption that, first and foremost, this has to be a process of growth and human fulfillment. Fortunately records sell, so you get something back for yourself too. Sometimes I argue with my manager, who insists that in a collaboration the split should be 50-50; but says who? For me it could just as easily be 20-80. Maybe I brought the initial idea and the other musician took it and spun it all the way around, making it universal. Who cares? For me it's never a matter of percentages, of "who did what", but of human relationships.

Is showbiz really a jungle?

The music world is like the world of drugs: there's the strongest one, and then there's everyone else. It depends which side you want to be on, whether you manage not to get swept up by the strongest one.

Arnold Schoenberg: "If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art." What do you think? I asked Roedelius the same question, now it's your turn.

This isn't really about Arnold, it's about your relationship with people. Whether you think art should be coram populo, or whether you've perched yourself on a throne, pontificating from on high about the great questions of existence. Music isn't about proving you're cooler than everyone else. And to write things that feel alive, I'd add, you have to be immersed in life, not standing apart from it.

Why does the drone lead the seasoned listener toward emotions that transcend the phenomenal world?

The music you're talking about connects us with states of oblivion and wellbeing. It's part of our tradition. Even the music of the thirteenth or fourteenth century still resonates through our strings. For example, about forty years ago, at a medieval festival in Umbria, I attended a concert of sacred music: at a certain point an Egyptian musician came up on stage with an oud. He started playing this ecstatic music that carries you away, an improvisation in praise of love. And that's when you realize that, even though in that case it was someone from a completely different culture, it still reached you, you understood it. If you have the ability to let yourself be listened to by the music, you realize that certain sounds coming from far away are still part of our own history. Our DNA also holds an archive of everything that came before us, and in certain situations it's as if a bell rings to remind you: "hey, I've heard this before, it belongs to me!"

Manuel Göttsching once told me about the need to give live electronic music performances a physicality equal to that of pop-rock, in order to better engage the audience. How do you go about that?

By making good music. If your playing — let's say with two computers and a keyboard — and your intent are sincere, then what you create, you create in that wonderful, unrepeatable instant. I'm proud to have given concerts with exactly the setup you just described, experiences where you could have heard a pin drop in the room, and the audience, in the end, applauded, probably recognizing the beauty in it. The problem is what you do, not so much what you do it with. Of course electronic music can never be like rock. Electronic music is the expression of a composer using certain means to achieve certain results. Full stop. You can't compare it to a Rammstein concert, who bring a physicality and an apocalyptic sense of theatrics that not even Kiss could match!

Has there ever been freedom on the radio, outside of pirate radio stations?

Money is the problem, and now FM radio runs on money, on advertising, and they play whatever certain record labels feed them. It's easier to do web radio, sure, but very few people listen to it. Back in my Radio Venezia days I used to program Miles; there was room to raise the bar, it wasn't just Queen, so to speak. Now it's a disaster.

Is the system always against originality?

Money is against originality. What's missing is an enlightened mind who, like in the fifteenth century, commissions the Raphael of the day to create a work that might just go down in history. What's missing is the patron who spots something worthwhile and invests their own money in it, knowing that maybe, one day, it'll pay off — or maybe it won't — and does it for the sheer pleasure of trying to give voice to a vision they believe is meaningful.

A wish of yours, unconfessed until now.

I once wished to collaborate with Kenny Wheeler, the towering jazz trumpeter who sadly left us in 2014. I approached him after one of his concerts and he treated me with astonishing kindness, even giving me his home address. I sent him a copy of "Wind", to which he replied saying he found it good, that in some parts it reminded him of David Sylvian, in others of Miles. "I listened to it the other night, at dinner with musician friends," he told me. I've always wondered which musicians he was having dinner with that night, while listening to my album.

What does your music say about you?

When I read what people who love my music write to me, I realize just how intricate the matter really is; people need to open up, to tell you they've been hurt, that they're suffering. We live in an age when it's hard to open up to others, and if you don't, nothing can get in. Those people have let the music into themselves, and it has drawn out of them a positive thought, a sense of hope, a smile, something that has helped them. So whoever listens to me may end up discovering something about themselves, more than about me.

Which virtue, above all others, do you wish you possessed?

To keep smiling. To laugh, to feel light.

What's the most extraordinary thing about being an artist?

People get in touch with me saying: "During lockdown I listened to your music and it saved me at a really difficult time." And then you realize that people like that are giving you something you never thought you'd receive, but which, deep down, was exactly what you were looking for. It's humanity speaking. And when you manage to make music that touches humanity, you have to feel like a lucky person.

(24 November 2024)

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