Paolo Tarsi - New Minimalist Paths

One of the most interesting musicians and composers on the Italian experimental scene, Marche-born Paolo Tarsi, born in 1984, has always been fascinated by early American minimalist music (Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Steve Reich). He composes electronic and chamber music, writes for theatre and video art, and works regularly with visual artists, DJs, filmmakers, galleries and contemporary art museums. We met him for this chat about his musical projects and his overall artistic approach.

When did you start listening to music, and when did you decide to pursue a career as a musician/composer?

Ever since I was a child I've felt a very strong attraction to sound. Alongside the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, I listened devotedly to Pink Floyd records, which held much more than just songs - to me they were like genuine sonic treasure chests. Thanks to artists like them, it seemed to me that music could actually influence change. Even though I had a particular leaning toward the visual arts, since my hometown had no art-focused high school, I turned instead to studying piano.

Tell me about your earliest recordings - what ideas were you working with back then, and how have they changed over time?

My earliest recordings were experimental in nature, attentive to the remarkable artistic crossroads that emerged between the world of the avant-garde and experimental rock, between kosmische musik and minimalism. Along this path, the work I produced from late 2014 through all of 2020 delves deeply into the sonic universe of acoustic instruments alongside electronic flourishes on synthesizers. Now all those experiences, mostly instrumental, have flowed into a new direction aimed at condensing, into a single musical universe, both the experimental spirit of those early works and the song form. As you might imagine, my drive to keep exploring is anything but dormant.

Today, more than ever, the relationship between humans and AI is a topic of daily conversation almost everywhere. You've always been interested in this. Did you foresee such a development?

Technology is a reflection, an echo of what's happening in society. Soon we'll be completely overrun - and honestly, we already are - by videos and images that will become increasingly difficult to distinguish as real or AI-generated. The consequences of all this worry and frighten me. But a gun never fires on its own, and artificial intelligence can become a wonderful tool. It's us, as always, taking extraordinary inventions and ruining them because we use them so poorly - we lack responsibility and awareness. The most astonishing thing to me is seeing George Orwell's prophecy actually coming true: Big Brother is watching us, and the little privacy we still have now will soon have completely evaporated.

How do you see the future of social media? What's your relationship with it?

The way people use social networks is largely tied to generational factors, which is why it shifts rapidly and very differently from one group to the next. In the past, you had to say things to each other's faces - there was no alternative to direct interaction. Now people stay shut up at home, behind a keyboard that seems liberating but actually keeps you caged. The more interconnected we become, the lower the level of dialogue seems to sink, quickly spiraling to extremes. It's a process of tribalization, certainly produced by people's connection through social media, countered by habituation and indifference. Every artist is a product of their time, and I'm a product of a historical moment split between two eras, between analog and digital. Now music seems to be little more than a career opportunity for influencers. Honestly, I never would have imagined that. And so today, unlike in the past, even those with talent no longer know whether they'll ever make it. In music as in painting, film or literature. For instance, I think it's wonderful to have access to music at any moment, but at the same time I think it's harmful, because I don't believe audiences now give music the space it needs. My musical tastes were shaped in a particular way precisely because I didn't have access to all the music in the world. I listened to whatever I could find, and if I bought a record I didn't like, that was a problem. Since I'd invested my savings in it, money I'd set aside with real effort, I spent more time with my records, studying them, and after a while I came to understand them.

Why the title "Unnatural Self"? What does it mean to you?

It's a work that arrives four years after the previous EP, "I Can't Breathe", and it's almost like the best of the four albums I could have made during these years. Because of the pandemic, I broke my habit of releasing one work a year. The timing never felt right, so I kept working in the studio, making and remaking, chasing every musician's Holy Grail: sound. Now, for the first time, the lyrics also play an important role, on equal footing with the music. I've always appreciated songs that offer multiple layers of meaning, that open themselves up to more than a single interpretation. Songs like that can reach far more people, and that's fascinating, because everyone finds something different in them. And that's exactly what's happening with the title track of this new work of mine. The feedback I'm getting is enriching the meaning I originally attributed to this song in a way that feels new and surprising to me.

Your album covers are always very carefully crafted - how important is packaging to you, and how do you choose the images?

Every artwork I've done has a specific meaning, directly tied to the music - my relationship with the visual arts has always been very strong. From the very beginning of my career, I was extremely fortunate to work with a great photographer like Roberto Masotti, who worked with labels like Ecm and Cramps Records, and later with Ahmed Emad Aldin, the designer of "The Endless River", the last studio album by Pink Floyd, a record I love dearly. Another important encounter was with Emil Schult, the artist who created the covers for some of the most iconic Kraftwerk albums, and who in 2018 made the cover for "A Perfect Cut In The Vacuum" for me. But the album I'm most satisfied with, both in terms of quality and coherence - visually as well as strictly musically - is without doubt "Unnatural Self". It's the result of meticulous work done together with photographer Rossano Ronci, graphic designer Giancarlo Cagliero - both of whom have created covers for Subsonica - and artist Roberto Rossini. In particular, meeting Gianfranco Cagliero, aka "Delavie", proved invaluable - he runs a graphic design studio in Turin specializing in album covers. Together we had a very intense exchange, on a sonic level too. Giancarlo is in fact the beating heart of [ MONOTONOISE ], an electronic duo devoted to ambient and techno, alongside Enrico "Urz" Vaudet, and he made the official video for their remix of "Unnatural Self". [ MONOTONOISE ] also produced some significant tracks on my new album - we really hit it off, and I hope we'll get to work together again in the future.

Which photographers and painters have inspired you the most, and why?

I love pop art as a snapshot of postwar Western consumerist society, just as I love the floating world of Japan's Ukiyo-e - through the prints of Utamaro, Hokusai and Hiroshige. If the former simply dwells on depicting reality, the latter alludes to the endless cycle of death and rebirth to which human beings are condemned, and from which they should try to escape by renouncing passions and material possessions. Two artistic phenomena as opposed and contrasting as they are, in a certain sense, close to one another. I also love cinema as a total work of art. That's why I was so pleased to take part in the soundtrack for "Wanted" by director Fabrizio Ferraro, a film produced by Vivo Film with Rai Cinema, presented at the 18th edition of the Rome Film Fest and currently in Italian theaters, before it airs on TV as well.

Do you have any concerts planned around Italy?

Yes, of course. To present the new album "Unnatural Self" I put together my band Paolo Tarsi's Ballet Mécanique, which includes Alessandro Gerbi, former percussionist of Csi and drummer of Diaframma. Together we'll be playing on March 15th at Teatro Rossini in Pesaro. Solo, meanwhile, I'm going back to scoring silent films live, like "Il gabinetto del dottor Caligari", Robert Wiene's masterpiece of German Expressionism. But I'm also touring an audio/visual live show titled "I Can't Breathe In The Vacuum", which brings together my first three releases on Anitya Records - I've taken it around a fair bit lately, from Amsterdam to Turin, via Germi, Manuel Agnelli's venue in the heart of Milan. The trilogy, which features visuals by artist Roberto Rossini, consists of one album and two chronologically consecutive EPs - "A Perfect Cut In The Vacuum" (2018), "Artificial Intelligence Ep" (2019), "I Can't Breathe Ep" (2020) - and is a sonic journey through ambient, kraut-rock, electronic experimentation and electropop.

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