Ozmotic - Digital symphonies for liquid times

Having emerged in a rather surprising way a couple of years ago by releasing an album alongside Fennesz, Riccardo Giovinetto and Simone Bosco have established themselves in a very short time with their shared project OZmotic as one of the most forward-looking presences on the Italian and international electronic scene. Latter-day heirs of that experience forged along the Berlin-Tokyo axis which turned glitch into a sonic component of a vast multimedia design (see: Alva Noto, Frank Bretschneider, Ryoji Ikeda and the Raster-Noton brand in general), they are protagonists of a path in which digital art is doubly intertwined with free improvisation. An encounter-clash between models and approaches placed at almost opposite poles: laptop music, pixel videomapping and computer language on one side, acoustic instruments, free associations and theoretical developments on the other. A complex puzzle whose various roots sink into different ground, which in the contemporary moment tend increasingly to blend together, giving rise to hybrid aesthetic forms, at once always unprecedented and never entirely "new". To this "liquidity", among other themes, the duo's second album is devoted, "Liquid Times", which borrows Bauman's metaphor to draw a parallel between sociology, culture, aesthetics and art. We spoke with Giovinetto and Bosco about this and much more, in an interview that is at once an opportunity to recount their story and an ideal place to share some reflections on the increasingly "liquid" state of the art.

Riccardo Giovinetto: we have different histories that had intersections and parallels. I come from a very simple family, which had no musical culture but a great desire to raise their children with an open mindset. I started studying piano at age five until around thirteen. From then until eighteen I wandered in search of something new, until I bought a saxophone and started studying jazz. The "turning point" came during my university years, where within a group formed with some classmates I met Simone. I then graduated with a thesis on the acoustics of musical instruments and started working as a freelancer (I work in environmental and architectural acoustics), and that's where my path and Simone's diverged, only to meet again in 2006, when I decided to throw myself back into the world of music. In 2011, after years spent through various experiences, OZmotic was born.

Simone Bosco: my father passed on to me his love of music, he was a guitarist and I remember every evening he'd pick up the guitar and we'd spend the evenings playing and singing. From a very young age I showed an aptitude for rhythm and after the inevitable stint at piano, at 10 I started studying drums. Then the usual time spent in rock, R&B and Latin American bands, and finally at 18 I discovered jazz. Curiosity toward new modes of expression brought me closer to improvisation, then the meeting with Riccardo. Afterwards I recorded eight albums with various lineups and began my collaborations with European and American musicians linked to the avant-garde (Ernst Reijseger, William Parker, Mary Halvorson). In parallel I devoted myself to writing for theatre, and experiences tied to contemporary music came along that broadened my knowledge and perception of sound. From there I began composing music for percussion ensembles and delved deeper into ethnic rhythms, experimenting in my groups with the idea of polyrhythm and polymeter. Then came the renewed meeting with Riccardo, and from the subsequent curiosity about electronic music... OZmotic was born.

How and when did the idea of OZmotic come about, and on what inspirational foundations? What is the meaning, if there is one, of the name you chose for this project? And what's the meaning of your pseudonyms? [Who is Stanislao and who is SMz?]

R.G.: For us OZmotic is a break-away project, a choice that is not only artistic but broader in scope. We felt the need to cut the cord tying us to instrumental music, to give a different dimension to our work and to shed the guise of jazz musicians who have many projects running in parallel, either as leaders or as sidemen, within which it's very difficult to build a common language, work as a group, rehearse, refine ideas, confining most of one's energy to practising one's instrument and to the stage. We felt the need to have a concept to work on for the time needed to let an artistic project blossom, putting to good use our past experiences, not only musically but also in the scientific and artistic fields in a broader sense. From this need to create an osmosis between the various elements that characterize our existence, OZmotic was born. The pseudonyms are a direct consequence of the need to break with the past, without thereby denying it.

How do you divide roles both at the performing and compositional level, and which of you brought what to this shared project?

R.G.: We work together to define the conceptual scope of the recording project and the live show that will follow from it, we thin out a set of ideas and isolate some keywords. Starting from these elements we begin preparing sonic sketches, working both remotely and with sessions focused on producing ideas. Then again remotely, keeping an eye on the space in the sonic spectrum that each of us can and must occupy, and so I work on textures, the soundscape and melodies, and Simone on the rhythmic components: percussion, objects and low frequencies. After this phase a new round of pre-production and refinement begins, starting again from the textures and melodies on my part, and the material is passed back to Simone who does a work of simplification, adding rhythmic structures and assessing what to remove and what to add so as not to create destructive overlaps. Then, together again, we assess the shape of the tracks and the tracklist, re-evaluating the tempos (both durations and pulses), the timbres and the weight of the instruments, and we reason about the overall direction the project is taking. At this point the work splits, shifting attention to two areas: the recording production and the live show. For the former we begin specific rehearsals, recording in real time what we play and then listening to and methodically analysing the result, separating what satisfies us from the rest, and we re-work the parts that are weak, leaving it to post-production where possible and otherwise working on the way we play the rest. For the live show the work usually comes afterwards, but it involves a big commitment on the video component too. In fact usually after building the first sonic sketches, I start working on the visuals, always keeping the concept very much in mind, identifying the graphic style and the colour palette and the presence of "representative" images. Then for each track that is "finished", a four-handed job begins again for the real-time interaction: who and what makes the video material react, timings, again here durations and bpm, which can differ from the album version, and then the setlist and the way it's presented on stage.

From the outside it seems one can sense an almost obsessive attention on your part to the aesthetic side of your work, both strictly musically and in everything surrounding the music (graphic choices, artwork, stage presence). Is attention to detail really a defining trait of OZmotic?

R.G.: Over the years we have honed the identity of the project, an identity made up of many elements, of details and nuances. Drawing up an artistic manifesto is not a secondary matter when building a project like ours, and so besides having worked on the "sound", on compositional forms and on the relationship between our musical instruments and the digital realm, and having identified the references that are fundamental to us (European art music, ambient, glitch music, electronic experimentation, IDM, contemporary jazz), we have explored the fields of graphic design, architecture, audio-video interaction, sociology, cinema, contemporary art, and in this way we have arrived at an identity. Belonging to it is a constellation of details that define it: concepts to work on (environment, social interactions, flows, multitudes), the spaces that fascinate us (untouched areas and vast urban sprawl, forests and metropolises), the graphic style that represents us (Ikeda, Kurokawa, Carlson), the colour palettes, the countries and cultures we draw on (Europe and Japan), our relationship with the live show (stage setup and the relationship with the audience), the "record as object" (packaging, artwork, lyrics), our coordinated image (logo, website, social media) and so on.

On a strictly musical level, the impression is that you operate at once as musicians and as sound designers. The (musical) interaction between the electronic "skeleton" and the acoustic sonic contributions in your tracks does indeed seem to constantly rest on a highly elaborate aesthetic design, in which every sound is tailored to the sonic space it is called upon to occupy. How present is this "sound design" really in your work, and how much instead is left to improvisation?

R.G.: your impression is correct, and the balance between the parts is fundamental. The improvisational work is now bilateral, meaning it focuses equally on both the instrumental and the electronic components, but it is very measured and closely tied to the work we do on the compositional side. We decide down to the smallest detail what to "hold still" and what to "move", and within which frequency range, both when we work as a duo and in collaborations. Sometimes it's the melodic aspect, sometimes the noise or the rhythmic part, sometimes a blend of various aspects, not to mention the effects.

S.B.: with today's technology it's possible to be very reactive even with electronic components — being able to be "musicians" with machines is one of our prerogatives, so the boundary you're describing between the electronic skeleton and acoustic sounds doesn't really exist. What we try to do is make the electronics and the acoustic component into a single whole that gives compactness to the sound. Naturally sound design is something we take particular care over, both in the studio and live: sometimes our music contains a huge mass of sound in motion, and then it becomes essential to carve out the necessary space for each sound. You could say we work on masses of sound the way conventional music works on harmony (that is, the layering of multiple notes), and we focus our attention not only on the correct tuning of each sound but also on the sonic space each one occupies in terms of frequency and energy. It takes an enormous amount of work, but we consider it essential to our music.

The “dialogue” between acoustic roots and electronic research (and sound design) that I mentioned earlier is one of the crucial elements of your work. How do you understand the relationship — always problematic, and still open today to infinite possibilities — between electronics and acoustic sounds?

R.G.: in my opinion, within the musical fields we're interested in, the new millennium has revealed a kind of boundary line that's hard to cross. Let me try to explain: jazz, having lost some of its great innovators (I'll just mention Miles Davis), has lost one of the core traits of its "tradition" — namely, evolving and questioning itself — and has become so layered that it's turned static. After brilliantly exploring forms, timbres and improvisational techniques, it has arrived at a kind of dead end, a hardening. Similarly, the world of electronic music, following the arrival of digital technology and after fierce experimentation, has lost — through the use, and I'd say overuse, of the laptop — a connection to the performative side of music that is vital, crucial. In that sense, when I'm in the audience and see musicians hunched over a computer, I wonder what they're actually doing, what part of it is truly born of the performance, of the here and now, and I ask myself how the audience can really interact with the sonic world enveloping them. I think the answer is unequivocal: bringing the two worlds together can only lead to an explosive result, full of possibilities, and that's exactly where there's still so much to do — finding balances, forms, alternations, new timbres, rhythmic solutions that are complex yet readable, and more.

S.B.: I agree with Riccardo, and I see musical evolution in the same light as other fields of human knowledge. It's inevitable — and we can already see it happening — that the music of the future will be an intersection of the two worlds. In the years to come, I don't think it will make sense anymore to talk about "electronic" or "acoustic" music. From a compositional standpoint too, it's worth reflecting: the question is whether techniques like the random generation of sounds within a probabilistic range can be considered composition at all. After all, Cage had already extensively explored chance music using entirely random techniques like tape-splicing or the I Ching, and Boulez also used strictly serial compositional techniques. Both of these compositional approaches rely on elements that can now be handed over to machines and produced in real time. Obviously the problem is that, with the software available today, it's extremely easy to compose and produce music, so, from my point of view, the deciding factor is always the control and awareness behind the elements that shape the result.

Looking at it from another angle, your sound brings together elements of a purely abstract nature (laptop sounds, sound effects) and elements deeply rooted in concrete reality (field recordings, found objects, much of the visuals you use). Is it fair to read the role of the sax or the drums, and their sounds, as "mediators" between the two dimensions, being sonic products of direct, concrete actions that nonetheless don't belong solely to contingent reality?

R.G.: your question touches on one of the aspects we've explored the most over the years: the balance between elements. At first, during the transitional phase between our musical origins rooted in African-American music and contemporary European jazz, and experimental electronics, the relationship between instruments and electronics was very unbalanced, obviously in favour of the instrumental side. Then, while working on "AirEffect", we realised the material risked being too static and "closed" on one side (textures, soundscapes) and too dynamic on the other, that is, too instrumental, and so we understood we needed to "clean up" the latter and deepen the former, to make it more alive and malleable, while still keeping our identity and history as instrumentalists, and giving the electronics what we felt they were missing: a performative quality and vitality they often lack. Adding visuals that interact in real time complicated things further, forcing us to rethink the balance of elements yet again, now split three ways: electronics, instruments and video. In any case, the instruments do serve exactly the function you're describing.

S.B.: for us, the "physical" relationship with our instruments remains essential, and we've had to reinvent them in a way. My set-up has no precedent in the history of drumming — I've had to "stitch it together" around myself over the years, and it's still evolving even now. So the habits and reflexes we inherited from our earlier musical experiences have changed and been refined too. It hasn't been easy to keep an "instrumentalist" mindset while interacting in real time, and to balance that within the complexity of the mechanisms we build into our music.

As I mentioned earlier, your first work as OZmotic ("AirEffect") was made entirely with Fennesz. How did this collaboration come about, and why did you choose to launch the project with a shared work rather than something entirely your own?

R.G.: "AirEffect" essentially came into being when the OZmotic project, as it exists now, took shape. It was 2011, the year we won a grant for soundscapes from the Province of Turin and began a very long process of field recording and experimentation. My scientific background on one hand, and Simone's experience in the performing arts on the other, allowed us to work out a new approach; from that moment we started looking for an initial fusion between our instrumental origins and the world of digital arts. There was a lot of experimentation and a dense series of collaborations with actors, a director, video artists and graphic designers, which allowed us to define a working method and put together a first draft of "AirEffect". We presented the work as a duo in 2012 at MiTo Settembre Musica, and Silvio Mossetto of Musica 90 was at that concert; having seen the piece, he suggested we do a collaboration with Fennesz. In 2013 Christian spent three days with us, working in a loft in Turin on a new version of AirEffect. After presenting it successfully as part of the MU90 season, a really wonderful and constructive relationship developed with Christian. Over the summer we met again for another live show and a studio session. That's how the record came about.

S.B.: on one hand, it was important to release the record with an artist who would lend international credibility to the work; on the other, it was an experience that made us realise the artistic path we'd taken was one we felt at home in. Christian was a key figure for us, both from a strictly professional standpoint and an artistic one. Then, as Riccardo said, an empathy and mutual respect developed that went well beyond the professional partnership.

What does this second work represent for you? Even though it came out not long after the first, what developments does it bring, both in strictly technical and sonic terms and in terms of inspiration?

R.G.: for us, this is the record that marks the definitive transition into the world of instrumental electronics, and it ushers in a sound that's more complex, richer in nuance and more self-aware; it's the record of balance between elements, carrying traces of noise, glitch music, field recording and IDM, while still standing firmly on instrumental music. And even though the release dates might suggest the two records are close relatives, AirEffect actually "closed" in 2013/2014, and this one differs quite a bit from the first, especially technically. The experience with Christian showed us how it was possible to "open up" the electronic dimension even further, so we started studying generative solutions we hadn't explored before, making unconventional use of certain synthesis techniques (granular and modular synthesis), or building digital chains to generate noise and finely control the sound spectrum, as well as simulating certain modular techniques that could be easily controlled. Opening up to programming with MaxMSP (one of the most famous and widely used graphical development environments for music and multimedia, ed.) within Ableton Live (one of the leading and most famous music production software packages, ed.) then allowed us to refine certain tools and gain better control over effects on the sax sound, so as to decontextualise it even further.

S.B.: "Liquid Times" is the result of an artistic reflection. We wanted to move even further away from the world of improvised and instrumental music. The direction we wanted to push ourselves in was an exploration within techno and IDM in terms of rhythms, and in particular the sound of kicks and basslines. That's how tracks like "Liquid Times", "Techne" and "Sliced Reality" came about, each carrying these elements within it, albeit in different ways. Then we wanted to keep exploring soundscape, musique concrète and ambient, and it's from that sonic exploration that "Storming", "Remembrance", "Diaspora" and "Above The Clouds" were born. And "Rhyzome" is, again, a deeper look into the relationship between contemporary music and electronics. Throughout all this there's also an attempt to maintain a thread of continuity with "AirEffect", which can be heard in the references to glitch music and the use of noise. In the end, though, I have to admit that all these "labels" used to define music seem a bit forced to me. We could simply say that "Liquid Times" is a further artistic discovery that led us to this kind of sound.

I imagine "Liquid Times" drew more than a little inspiration from Zygmunt Bauman's depiction of postmodernity, in which the collapse of every barrier and the relentless pursuit of ease have produced a "liquid modernity", overwhelmed by overstimulation, where everything flows and nothing endures. A perfect mirror of this is current cultural production itself (musical/sonic, but also cinematic and literary) — overabundant and torrential, made up of short-lived, throwaway phenomena, with very few works managing to settle and become truly decisive in shaping and reshaping a cultural fabric that isn't confined to extremely narrow groups of people (niches). What do you think about this? In your view, what role can a project like OZmotic play in such a context?

R.G.: Bauman's work was a fundamental starting point both for the album's concept and for the inspiration behind the individual tracks, and if we look at the "music market" or "cultural market", whichever you prefer, we're faced with a striking cross-section of the dynamics inherent to the liquidity born of globalisation that he and others write about. I use the word "market" in a broad sense, including pretty much everything that revolves around a project like ours (festivals, institutions, clubs, labels, audiences, media). Often the "market" demands novelty, feeding on it from a distance and through the media, and when it can't find what it considers "new" — without ever really analysing what that term actually means — it "saturates" artists who already have high visibility. The solution obviously isn't simple, but our choice is both clear and firm: to build a solid identity, and layer around that identity a series of experiences, both in terms of output and collaborations (with other artists, dance, theatre, contemporary art), that allows that core to strengthen and grow to the point of becoming genuinely attractive. Only time will tell if we're on the right path, but our feeling is that we are...

To what extent did you correlate your sonic research with these themes? I read in your own words that the album gathers “sound traces” from different cultures and places, almost as if it wanted to serve as a critical portrait of the “liquid modernity” mentioned above. Do you see “Liquid Times” more as a testimony of the “liquid times” in which you composed and conceived it, a critique of them, or a form of “resistance”, an attempt at “solidification”?

R.G.: one of the key words we had put into the conceptual flow of “Liquid Times” was “traditional choirs/chants”. I spent months selecting Gregorian chants, tribal choirs and excerpts of ancient voices and working them into a granular synthesizer to produce drones and evolving textures; practically all the textures on the record were made starting from these choirs and chants. From there I also synthesized a lot of noise (both vertical and horizontal) or glitch, and scattered them throughout the whole record.

S.B.: it's hard to answer this question, let's say that “Liquid Times” gives sound to an imaginary, a series of concepts that inspired us. As far as I'm concerned, the goal was to use rhythms tied to ancestral and ritual traditions. I worked on this material both in rhythmic terms, contextualizing and recomposing it structurally through the use of polyrhythms and polymeters, and sonically, dressing it in a sound that in my imagination was linked to diasporization and the physical-sonic environments it carries with it.

The intersection between audio and visuals is one of the most exploited (and at times abused) means in electronic music, in a very broad sense, over the last twenty years. To what extent do you think this interaction can be decisive? And how do you think it's possible to escape those relationships of one-sided subordination that sometimes make the video feel merely incidental to the audio, or vice versa, draining the dialogue itself of meaning and substance?

R.G.: The link between sonic matter and vision is inherent to the nature of digital language, since both are made up of the same basic units. In many cases the sound is its graphic trace, and the graphic trace is the sound. It's a structural uniformity that occurs both at the level of data organization and processing and at the level of software. That said, and well aware of the risks you're talking about, we believe the crucial point lies in finding a balance between the parts. This is a goal we've tried to keep in mind over time, one we already touched on earlier regarding the mainly musical side of things, but which becomes even more present, on a macro level, in the relationship between audio and video. The two streams, audio and video, have to be born in parallel, follow the same conceptual lines and condition each other, so as to become a single whole; in relation to that, the work has to develop by seeking this balance through flows of hierarchy (what matters more and what matters less at each stage of the project), dynamics (kinetics and brightness), real-time interaction (clearly, but never trivially, linking sonic "movements" and physical actions to visual events), and, last but not least, an overall evolving narrative, both sonically and visually.

I'll close with something that's more of a provocation than a question: can you list five works, whether musical/sonic or visual/multimedia, that managed to "settle" as sources of inspiration for your art, escaping the "liquidity" of the times in which, inevitably, you too find yourselves operating?

R.G.: If you're referring to the contemporary scene and specifically to sound/visual works, we can mention these: “Syn_” by Ryoichi Kurokawa, “Datanatomy” by Ryoji Ikeda, the Murcof|AntiVj project, and certain aspects of the audio-video project by Alva Noto and Sakamoto. If instead the context is strictly musical and not specifically contemporary, then the sheer breadth of our references is such that we couldn't possibly limit ourselves to just five works...

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