Iosonouncane - Sounds and Words Beyond the Frost

by Alessio Belli

I won't hide my difficulty here: interviews often try to present and make sense of a record. I think applying that "procedure" to "IRA" would be a shame, since it risks diminishing the power of a work that the listener should simply take in and experience as freely as possible…

This kind of observation has been coming up often lately from your fellow musicians. It's something I'm glad about. It puzzles me a little, because as far as I'm concerned I just made a record, working with the material I had, with the ideas I had, obviously aware that the scale and nature of the work would make it atypical, anomalous, within the Italian context. Distinctive, unusual? On one hand, this kind of reaction obviously makes me happy. But what pleases me most is sensing that this work is generating a kind of attention that isn't given to many others. It's not being treated like just another record of songs, the kind that come out every day.

But fortunately there's no shortage of things to dwell on: let's start with the cover! My first impression was that it recalled "The Lighthouse" by Robert Eggers: can you tell us about the visual side of "IRA"?

It's on my list, but I still haven't seen "The Lighthouse". From the start I was clear that "IRA" would be, absurdly enough, a black-and-white record. A record extremely rich in colour, musically speaking. But the feeling I wanted, and the one this material has always conveyed to me in general, was a dark, dramatic one. That doesn't mean it's the only feeling present — quite the opposite: the record is full of openings and emotionally different moments. But for me it was always that, also because it was very hard to sum up this album in a single colour or set of colours. The most fitting solution was this black, with the outline of a body emerging from it. The cover portrays a completely naked man, and it ultimately seemed to me the best choice to convey and symbolically represent solitude within a multitude.

The work on the artwork really took a long time. We went through a huge number of phases and choices, then reconsidered them between us. In the end we settled on that particular shot, which isn't technically perfect — in fact, at first we'd put it among the possible rejects. But what I like about that shot is its spontaneous, off-the-cuff quality. It looks like a stolen photograph. It's impossible to place the subject; you can't tell whether it's a shot taken at night or inside a dark, enclosed space, whether it was taken outdoors in nature or in a concrete prison. You can't tell if it's a warm or a cold shot, whether that man is naked because he's hot or because he's forced to be. That ambiguity gives it great narrative and symbolic power, and so in the end we decided on it. It felt right not to put any text over it — to leave just this image, so neutral and so narrative, creating on the back of the vinyl a kind of manifesto that makes it resemble some form of statement of protest.

The choice to turn your voice into an instrument among instruments, to make the lyrics—always sung in different languages—almost always incomprehensible, makes “IRA” even more enigmatic, almost mystical. Is there perhaps a certain distrust in the possibility of communicating something to your listeners through the sung word?

No, quite the opposite, actually: there's a deep faith in communication. If there's any distrust in me, or rather refusal, it's toward the now entrenched and dominant idea of communication as a purely functional vehicle. We're used to thinking, both when talking about records and in our everyday lives, that communication must serve a function above all else. A song is good if it "works", but the concept of working requires a purpose. Something works when it fulfills its intended purpose. A lampshade works because it lets me have light when the world is dark, a fork works because it lets me eat food. A work of art—forgive this blunt term, which really ought to be justified before being used—doesn't serve that kind of purpose, doesn't have that kind of function or role. Communication is the same: communicating is something far more layered. I believe that communicating the inability to communicate opens up narrative and interpretive levels. “IRA” is extremely communicative precisely because it starts from the premise of giving up a certain idea of communication. I'm not a singer-songwriter who writes lyrics and uses a guitar or piano to accompany them. I make records, I work on the music, and every element, every aesthetic, timbral, sonic choice I make contributes to shaping a narrative, within which the lyrics are just one of the actors on stage. I have enormous faith in communication, and I'm convinced that making it complex—which doesn't mean making it complicated, just layered—is one way of showing that.

Does the order of the tracklist follow the order in which the songs were "born", or did you arrange them according to some other criterion?

I honestly couldn't even tell you the order in which the songs were born. Many of them, for instance, I put together by merging fragments written at very different times. “Priel”, “Ashes”, “Prison”, “Cri”, “Hajar”, “Foule”: these are all tracks that bring together fragments born at different moments, and so, quite simply, that came from different Ableton sessions (that's the software I use to jot down ideas). The first track, “Hiver”, I actually started writing as the closing track for “DIE”, but I couldn't finish it. There was a time when I was convinced that “DIE” needed a closing song after “Mandria”. I sketched out a few drafts that I could never complete: at some point I realized that clearly, in my head, the record was already finished. I accepted the idea that what I actually wanted was a kind of "non-ending", and among the drafts I'd jotted down back then was a piano progression that eventually became “Hiver”. And magically, when I picked it back up years later, I immediately wrote a vocal line, structured it, and it became the opening track of “IRA”.

Listening to “IRA”, you sense a considerable distance from “DIE”. And if you think back to “La macarena su Roma”, it feels like you're talking about two completely different musicians, even two different men. Is there anything left of the Iosonouncane of 2010? Can you take stock, artistically, of these ten years?

Between “La Macarena su Roma” and “DIE” I did nothing but… work on “DIE”. For various reasons. “La Macarena su Roma” had done well, but only within a narrow circle of enthusiasts, so no collaboration offers were coming my way. I did very little: I worked on two theatre productions for a company of friends, and had very few opportunities to write music. On top of that, at the time I had neither the equipment nor the technical skills needed to easily work on new material at home. The phase of working on “DIE” that I did alone, before starting to work on it with Bruno Germano, was almost dramatic: I had musical solutions in my head that I simply couldn't reproduce technically. I couldn't even tell 100 hertz from a kilohertz, I couldn't make bass sounds that matched what I had in mind. From that point on I started working with Bruno, and I watched him closely. We spent months in the studio, I had him explain a ton of things to me, and I picked up skills that later let me work a great deal at home. So, after “DIE”, I found myself writing an enormous amount of music, more than I'd ever done before. In two months I wrote ten times more than everything I'd written in the rest of my life put together. “IRA” ended up containing two hours of music, but I've got twice that much left over, if not five times as much.

That's what happened over these years: I wrote an enormous amount. This hyper-productivity, which also included various soundtracks, sound design work, artistic productions and collaborations with others, gave me a huge push to develop ideas that until then had only been potential, imagined. Certainly, what remains of who I was ten years ago is the experience I've gained. It seems strange to say this today, the music world we live in now is completely different, but before releasing my first record I played roughly 250 concerts everywhere, in the vast majority of cases for free, travelling alone by train loaded up like a mule, while also working at a call centre at the same time. From the start of 2009 to the summer of 2012 I played around 250 shows. That kind of thing forges you, and given how I'm built, it just makes my stubborn Sardinian-mule forehead even harder. When the idea of making “IRA” came to me, I had no fear about it at all. I wasn't afraid to release a record that's clearly out of step with the logic of streaming, which unfortunately is all-consuming right now. So what's left of me? What's left is the drive to do only what I like and what interests me doing, and the refusal to do anything that doesn't align with that choice.

“IRA” makes a masterpiece of recent Italian singer-songwriter music like “DIE” look like a sapling next to this latest release's towering oak tree. Ironically, doesn't a record like this risk overshadowing your own earlier work?

I happened to listen back to “DIE” recently, since we have to prepare some of its songs for this summer's tour. By now I look at it with enough distance to think—as always happens—"I could have arranged this track better, this sound doesn't quite work, the mix leans a bit too much in this direction", etc. But that's all normal. In a month, or a year, I'll make the same kind of judgment about “IRA”. There are pieces of “DIE” that I still think are powerful, that I still love 100%, and that I feel are mine in every musical choice: I'd say especially “Tanca”, which to me seems the track closest to “IRA”. I absolutely couldn't have made “IRA” without going through “DIE” first, but the leap I had to make to go from “Macarena” to “DIE” was enormous in its own right. And before “DIE” came out, there was no certainty at all that the whole thing would work. I found myself with this record, we started thinking about how to promote it, and for us it was a huge question mark. I was sure about the quality of the work, about how I'd worked on it, about the time I'd put into it, but looking around, we realized that record ran completely against the grain of what was starting to take shape at the time as that dreadful thing called It-Pop, or what gets unthinkingly labelled indie so often. Something that makes my stomach turn, because in essence it's just Italian pop music that, as always, refreshes its sound a little to keep up with market demands—nothing different from what's always happened. But when “DIE” came out, it ran completely against the prevailing sensibility taking shape at the time. It wasn't a record about feelings, or at least not the way we've unfortunately grown used to hearing feelings handled, treated the way a teenager would. It's not a record of songs structured in a pathetically predictable way, it's not a record mixed with the vocal pushed way up front and super radio-friendly, etc., etc.

Yes, “DIE” is probably a sapling compared to “IRA”, but at that moment it wasn't one at all—it was courageous. The fact that it did well and has settled in over time makes me very happy, and I don't take it for granted at all: it wasn't a given back then, and it isn't now either. It's something that still surprises me a little.

In a previous interview with us you described yourself as "a composer with no particular attachment to any specific instrument", and “IRA” indeed confirms the all-encompassing nature of your compositional approach. Given the deep bond between the music, the musicians it was composed with, and how closely all of this is tied to the live presentation in theatres, will the next step be a full-blown theatrical work that won't even make it to record?

No. In my head, “IRA” is absolutely not a "work" in the sense it might have been understood in 70s prog, with a libretto handed out at the door. Performing it in theatres was a choice dictated by necessity. Let me explain: at a certain point I realized I wanted to present “IRA” live, playing it in full with the musicians I'd shaped it around in detail, and who have worked with me for years with a tenacity and patience I'll never stop thanking them for. I wanted to play it in full with them, and when I talked to the people I've always worked with, meaning Panico Concerts, I said: "Okay, I want to do this." And they said: "Great, where do we do it?" The question was: clubs or theatres? I love clubs a lot: the idea of the audience standing, close, packed together, hit by a serious volume. But then we realized it was genuinely difficult to play a two-hour record: we knew it lasted two hours, but the audience buying tickets didn't. So at some point we decided to do this and play it in theatres, because that would let people enjoy what we were doing without the fatigue that sets in after an hour on your feet, or the chatter that inevitably creeps into your ears. That was the reasoning behind the choice, along with wanting greater control over the sound quality. Now, obviously you can also put on shows with excellent sound quality in clubs, but clubs are all very different from one another: we would have had to reset and start over—not from scratch, but pretty far back—at every single show. Theatres, on the other hand, are designed to sound more or less the same. So that's why we chose theatres. I don't have theatrical works in mind, I have musical works in mind, records. No, the next step won't be that, and I don't know what it will be. I haven't started thinking about it yet, although I already have clear ideas about what the next record will be, but I don't think it'll be a theatrical work.

Over the years, and around the release of “IRA”, you've had the chance to talk about your musical, literary and broader artistic influences and how they've fed into your compositions: but is there a passage in “IRA” influenced instead by a news story, a historical event hidden among those tracks?

No. The idea for this record came to me starting from the suggestive pull of language, and that pull came through writing the melodies. I always write melodies very quickly. Every other musical aspect costs me a lot of effort, because I'm neither a virtuoso guitarist nor a virtuoso pianist, nor a composer who knows harmony in great detail: I know it, I can work my way around it, but I'm not "trained", so to speak. Everything costs me a certain amount of effort. The one thing I can objectively do extremely quickly is write melodies. The method I've developed since “Tanca” leads me to write melodies that not only don't have a song-like shape, but are sequences of vocal movements that shift upward, sideways, downward. When I write them, things already come out that point my imagination in a direction. For “DIE” it was constantly repeating certain words, which I then worked on and developed into all the lyrics. In the case of “IRA”, at a certain point, I realized I had melodies that all sounded different from what I'd written up to that point, and that carried with them sounds that weren't familiar to me. That suggested to me a sense of solitude, distance, disorientation, difficulty expressing oneself, of being understood. In general, a sense of estrangement.

I worked on it and realized I was searching for the narrative of a crossing, a journey. That was the starting point, and then of course, when you're dealing with an archetype like this, the references can be found just as much in the biblical tradition as in twentieth-century American literature, as well as in the news of these very days. Because it is, in fact, an archetype, just as it was in “DIE”: the man out at sea, the woman waiting for him on land, can be anything. It can be Ulysses, or the story of any migrant, or a fisherman, a shipwrecked man. Both are the story of any man; the feeling of estrangement, distance, crossing, the gradual drifting away from the place where one was born, whether physical or symbolic, is the story that belongs to every living being.

Given the "difficulty" of listening to it and the fact that it sits outside commercial logic, isn't there a risk that such a beautiful, powerful and revolutionary work will only be appreciated by people who are already fans of Iosonouncane?

If I worried about that and tried to make something that chased current market estimates, I'd be making the biggest mistake of my life, also because there's no recipe that guarantees you'll blow up on the radio or on Spotify, as people like to say these days. It feels like watching a gold rush that really only pays off for a very few people and plunges everyone else into misery. I don't worry about this at all - and on top of that, I can tell you that when I made "DIE", the question was exactly the same: "Aren't you worried that a forty-minute record made of six long tracks - one that never got played on mainstream radio, was never talked about on TV, never got a news segment - aren't you worried that this might confine you to a niche audience?". And the results were the exact opposite: at the first show I did for "DIE" there were 150 people with free entry, and at the last one there were 1,500 paying. My own trajectory proves exactly the opposite, but, I repeat, it's something I don't worry about and absolutely must not worry about. If I did that, it would introduce into the act of writing a logic that would prevent the full realization of what I've imagined. At the end of the day, my job is to imagine things and give them form.

Very concretely, I imagine some curious listener who's heard good things about the album, seeks you out, and finds themselves facing the opening track of "IRA"...

On Spotify, Robert Wyatt's records get far fewer streams than mine, and that alone is dramatic. It's a logic I reject because to me it's clearly flawed. Robert Wyatt should be the most listened-to artist in the world, but he isn't!

If the music of "IRA" were to become the soundtrack of a film, which director would you want at the helm? I think Bela Tarr (or maybe Aleksandr Sokurov) would be perfect.

I've always found it really hard to imagine visual translations of my work. I even tried, at the time, to make a video for "Stormi" and we never got anywhere with it. That's because when I write lyrics I almost always start from visual sequences: I sketch them out visually and then transcribe them, fitting that image into the grid provided by the melodies. It's very hard to imagine someone else being able to step in and translate what I do into images, because in my head those images already exist. If I try to abstract it this way, in my head "IRA" resembles a colossal cinematic work, but not a period piece. Something that implies an ascent, an immersion that at first can be exhausting but ends up being liberating. To cite the most obvious name that comes to mind in this sense, I'd say Kubrick

These past few days you announced the new dates for the summer tour: since that "infamous" Primavera Sound 2017 date, the situation has unfortunately changed. What does it feel like to play live again now, having to deal with all these dynamics at play?

We'll have to see how the dynamics play out, little by little. You have to keep getting tested constantly, be extremely careful, because a positive test, contact with someone positive, means quarantine, and therefore weeks of shows suspended, and so on. It's definitely a more delicate and complex situation than the idea of touring we've always had and always done. That said, setting aside the logistical side, which we'll learn to handle, just the fact of being back in the rehearsal room playing, finding ourselves wiring up the instruments, opening the cases and figuring out how to set them up, doing all this "umarèll" stuff (as they say in Bologna, meaning like an old-timer with his toolbox, velcro straps and all), playing and figuring out what new piece of gear might be needed: all of this is thrilling, wonderful. Just having to rehearse again gave me huge adrenaline rushes that I hadn't felt in over a year, because all this chaos happened when we were more or less two-thirds of the way through preparing the tour for the full live performance of "IRA". It was a bit of a cold shower, we had to stop suddenly. That's why we didn't tour last summer, and that's why it turned out to be extremely complicated to think about touring this summer with the full band, because unfortunately the pandemic interrupted our rehearsals before they were complete, and we found ourselves without a finished set, so we couldn't just decide from one day to the next, "Let's meet up for two or three days, rehearse a couple of songs, play them on a livestream?". That's something we can't do, because the material is very complex, there are a lot of musicians, and we never finished rehearsing.

When we meet again, we'll have to start almost from scratch, get our heads back around everything, also because these songs are truly exhausting to play, for every single musician. There's so much to do at the same time, and at times you almost have to play like electronic drum machines - it takes a huge amount of memory work, concentration, and at the same time precision of touch on the instruments.

It's hard to separate you from Sardinia. Is there any emerging artist from your homeland you'd like to point us to?

Alek Hidell, who just released "Ravot", his first record. I believe you at OndaRock wrote about it too: definitely him. A musician to keep an eye on, an anomaly on the Italian scene, moving in the border zones between electronic music and hip hop, and at times prog - I think he's one of the most interesting things around right now. He's Sardinian, he's a friend of mine, but that's absolutely not why I'm mentioning him - I have plenty of friends who make music and I don't mention all of them. Him, though, I really do find genuinely interesting.

After the well-received split with Verdena, do you have any other collaborations planned?

Right now I've got - very close on the horizon - some film work coming up. More soundtracks. Paolo Angeli and I have a record ready, already mixed, made using material recorded during the theatrical tour we did in 2018. It'll presumably be out before too long. I don't have any other collaborations in the works at the moment.

You're in the middle of a long "session" of interviews for the album launch: is there anything you still haven't managed to say that you think is important?

Luckily, as I was saying at the start, it seems to me that "IRA" has generated a level of attention, both on the record itself and on my way of working, that gratifies me every time. There are so many records for which it's hard to come up with questions that go beyond "Is this record about you?" or "Did you play guitar on this song?". It seems to me that this record - it had already happened somewhat with "DIE" - is generating attention on a really interesting level.

Another thing that strikes me as interesting is that a misunderstanding I've always been somewhat condemned to until recently is perhaps also being set aside — the fact that, for reasons of age or geography, I've always been lumped into an indie singer-songwriter scene that I don't actually belong to and never have. This despite Tanca, Buio, Mandria: maybe it's only because of Stormi or Il corpo del reato on La Macarena su Roma, even though the album as a whole already departs sharply from that world. I'm not saying I suffered over this, because honestly I couldn't care less, but it seems to me that right now the perception of what I do and what I am as a musician is finally coming through in full.

The idea that I'm someone who puts out an album every five years and does nothing else in between has really taken hold. In reality, between "DIE" and "IRA" I made four soundtracks, scored a piece by Edoardo Tresoldi (a forty-minute composition that's effectively an album in its own right, which I'll record and release sooner or later), collaborated with Paolo Angeli and with Verdena, produced several albums, went on tour with Dino Fumaretto, and scored some films. I've done a mountain of things, written a mountain of music, and honestly I struggle to think of an Italian colleague as productive. It's funny that for many people I ended up lumped into that big catch-all that is Italian indie singer-songwriter music of the 2000s, let's call it that. Maybe "Stormi" contributed to this misunderstanding — it became a hit — but I think you need to be very clear-eyed about that too. Today hits are born and bloom on streaming platforms, which have an algorithm that makes a track that's been playlisted several times automatically get re-playlisted, so it's a success that generates itself, and the quality of the listening is telling, in the sense that a track's numbers are very often generated by the randomness of the platform's own recommendations, so there's not much to be proud of. When "Stormi" went gold, it left me completely indifferent — not because I want to play the tough guy, but because I'm aware of how it works.

I find it far more meaningful to see that, even though my media exposure is basically zero and the big networks and TV shows don't talk about me at all and have no interest in my work, people still come to my shows. When we launched the tour featuring the full performance of "IRA" in preview, doing it completely independently, without spending a euro on promotion or sponsorships, it was a real question mark. We're talking about venues with around 1,000 to 1,200 seats, sometimes more, and I kept wondering how it could possibly work. Calling people together today to go hear something they've never listened to before, when in reality everyone — musicians and audiences alike — is chasing the sing-along. People go to concerts to film the singer performing the song they know, while at the same time singing it louder than the singer himself: the real subject of that concert is you, singing the song you know. It's a perpetual selfie. Calling people together to go listen to something they've never heard is a risky, strange thing to do. And when we saw the dates selling out within days, it was really beautiful — it means people are placing their trust in you, and in the path you're on, one that goes beyond singles, beyond Spotify numbers.

(15/05/2021)

(Cover photo by Silvia Cesari)

by Valerio D'Onofrio and Daniele Modica

Jacopo Incani, better known as Iosonouncane, is one of the most original Italian musicians of the new generation of independent artists, too often labeled under the broad, catch-all category of indie. But the truth is that Iosonouncane operates in an entirely different sphere, probably well above the contemporary Italian scene, in terms of the complexity of his work and his compositional and visionary skill. A dog with no master, so rich in ideas and innovative insights that comparing him to other musicians treading similar paths between electronics and singer-songwriter craft becomes impossible. Ahead of his upcoming tour with Paolo Angeli, we had the pleasure of interviewing him.

After an album like "DIE", a truly monumental and admirable work that received well-deserved acclaim across the board from both audiences and critics, you changed direction and moved toward collaborations. The first was the split with Verdena. How did that idea come about?

Since the release of "DIE" I've worked on several projects: I released the split with Verdena; I scored a piece by Edoardo Tresoldi with a 40-minute composition conceived for an ideal ensemble of around 50 musicians; I wrote and produced the soundtrack for an investigative documentary ("Follow The Paintings"); I worked as arranger and producer on the latest albums by Colapesce and Dino Fumaretto; I scored a silent film with Corrado Nuccini and Enrico Gabrielli; I recorded a Radiohead cover; I had a hand in tracks by Colombre, ARTO, Matteo Fiorino and Phill Reinolds. And probably a few other things I'm forgetting. They're all experiences fully in keeping with the way I am as a musician, which is a way of working in which writing, arranging, sound design and production all coincide. So nothing could be more natural.

Honestly, it was very easy. We understood and welcomed each other with great ease right from the start, both personally and artistically. What unites us is a very similar personal history — Sardinia, leaving home, Bologna — and the same drive toward the journey. What sets us apart is our different nature as musicians: he's an improviser deeply bound to a single instrument, while I'm a composer with no particular attachment to any specific instrument.

What does Paolo Angeli's music add, including live, to the world you've built in your solo work?

Working with Paolo generates a spontaneity full of surprises that, being used to writing everything down in detail, I would hardly experience otherwise — or at least not in these terms.

The complexity of "DIE" conceals a huge amount of work that took at least four years, and I imagine it cost you a great deal of effort as well as just as much joy at the result. Did you ever think or hope that that work might become something of a forerunner for a new direction in independent Italian music?

I don't see anyone capable of doing that. In recent years quite a few works or projects have come out that clearly show the influence of my work, but it's all limited to imitating certain aesthetic traits.

In your solo albums you make extensive use of electronics (you've also played at the Spring Attitude Festival, dedicated precisely to those sounds), an element that today is widely used - and often overused - and which in many cases gives the impression of being deployed almost to mask compositional shortcomings. In your case, though, the two things coexist perfectly and seem to work in tandem; was this a complex learning process, or was it your idea from the very beginning?

I've been working with electronics since 2006. So it's been about 12 years that I've been writing - meaning composing, arranging and producing - also using electronic instruments. There isn't a single track I've written on guitar alone, on piano alone, or solely on beats and samplers. I always write by moving from one to the other, integrating the ideas that emerge along the way. From the start I had a clear idea of how I wanted to work, but of course everything changes and grows richer as the work progresses.

I don't know whether it has ever been your intention to portray, through your records, a cross-section of today's Italy. That's probably true of "La macarena su Roma", but in "DIE" I sense a strong political charge coming more from the music than from the lyrics - would you agree?

As an author, a cross-section of a country only interests me insofar as it's taken as a starting point for a discourse, not as an endpoint. I'm not interested in chronicling an event or a place, I never choose narrative linearity, and I have no goal of exhaustiveness or clarity. That said, I completely agree with what you're saying about "DIE". A clear distinction has to be made between reportage and politics, and a record that interrogates language cannot help but carry a strong political charge.

The list is long, and Paolo Angeli is at the top of it.

Music is the art form to which you've devoted your life. But the arts often influence one another, so I'd rather not ask you the usual question about your musical influences - I'd like to ask instead whether there's been a filmmaker or perhaps a painter whose images gave you fundamental insight for developing your own ideas.

Cinema is a huge influence on me, one of the most important. I can't give you specific names, because the influence doesn't come so much from a particular director as from cinema itself as a medium and method for observing movement. As for painting, I can tell you I love the Impressionists unconditionally.

I approach the work on every album as a long process of research and study. I study its vocabulary, the construction of its images, the cadence of its phrases, its sound. Reading is essential to this. Each album - and so each phase of my life - corresponds to different reading. I'd cite Ballard for "La macarena su Roma" and Pavese for "DIE".

I can't give you a fully worked-out answer to this question, since I've never really thought it through in depth. And I probably haven't because the issue doesn't particularly worry me. It's certainly true that there's been a shift in how music is consumed, but there will always be a need for complete, articulated, even imposing works. I like playing live, and I particularly like doing it with my musicians. I think of the concert as a moment of open confrontation with the audience - both as a collective entity and as the individual people who make it up. I believe an artist has a moral, cultural and political duty not to be accommodating or easy, and I believe that difficulty of access is a precious asset, an opportunity not to be wasted. As a listener, I'm not looking for consolation or identification, but new questions that push me to search for answers. As a musician, with my records and concerts I try to give others what I received from the artists and works that matter most to me.