SKE - Labyrinthine Immediacy

Paolo Botta, from Lombardy, born in 1979, is by now a veteran of the global progressive scene. With his arsenal of keyboards, put to the service of his own Yūgen and Not A Good Sign, but also of Picchio dal pozzo, Homunculus Res, French TV, he has brought to the scene a vein of imagination and precision, marrying rhythmic drive and melodic flair with a keen attention to the sonic and evocative qualities of instruments. Ske is his solo project, which ten years after his debut “1000 Autumns” reaches its second milestone in 2021 with a thoroughly accomplished album. We caught up with him by email to talk about “Insolubilia” and his approach to the challenges facing progressive music today.

While reading a book about paradoxes, I came across this fascinating medieval term, insolubilia, which refers to paradoxes, in particular the liar's paradox. I use it as the album title in the sense of a “collection of unsolvable things”. In fact the pieces on the record are largely inspired by paradoxes and by so-called cast puzzles, of which I'm an avid consumer and collector. Basically, these are small metal objects with an appealing design, interlocked in such a way that they seem impossible to separate. The game is figuring out how to take them apart, and then put them back together. This concept guided the writing of the tracks: I tried to “hide”, or rather “veil”, the various musical interlockings I used, behind an appearance of linearity/melody/flow.

I consider myself a rock musician who finds it more interesting to look outside of rock while making rock. Within rock, I'm a progressive rock enthusiast, a genre that immediately fascinated me for its timbral, rhythmic and harmonic/melodic diversity. I appreciate almost all of its subgenres, so any references you can hear are there for a reason: they're the offspring of my own love, as a listener, for those things, and I'm glad they come through. 

Änglagård are one of the bands from the '90s that I've loved most, and their sound has greatly influenced me, as I think is easy to notice. I also appreciate post-rock; if I had to name just one band, I'd say Bark Psychosis's “Hex” is the summa of everything I love about the genre. What interests me is how they managed to blend rock with minimalism, the suspension and purity of certain timbres with a rock approach, rather unusual but unpretentious polyrhythms, a bass sitting lower than the kick drum. These are elements quite far removed from the seventies sound that is my own background, but they attract me strongly, and perhaps the atmospheres you're referring to come precisely from there.

Even though I've been writing music for decades now, I don't really have a fixed modus operandi. Sometimes I'll strum little things on cheap toy keyboards that strike me, and then bring these small intuitions to the workbench and build on top of them. Other times I start from a musical/mathematical concept and write out several solutions, then choose whichever one feels best by instinct; other times still I don't even touch an instrument and write everything directly in MIDI on the DAW. I've even recorded voice memos of melodies or spontaneous ideas, only to listen back to them and reassemble them in my head while pushing the swings at the park. In short, I like to stay flexible in how I write, but one thing never changes: once a track takes shape, whatever kind of track it is, even the most structured or rigorous one, the final choices are made by the heart, not the head. If some solutions that feel right work better than the self-imposed rules that got me there, I have no qualms whatsoever about breaking the rules and satisfying the emotion at the expense of “formal beauty”.

When I started buying vintage instruments, if you wanted that seventies sound you had no choice but to find the original. Emulations existed too, but frankly they were almost laughable, if not downright irritating. So over the years I gradually ended up with a decent fleet of machines, which certainly allowed me to faithfully replicate the sound I love, but also to have fun exploring less-travelled timbral paths. Today the landscape has changed radically: digital emulations are fantastic, and in the synth world there are even excellent, affordable analog replicas, a dream for enthusiasts with a thin wallet. However, the small/big flaws that vintage machines have are often exactly what emulators can't give you, because emulators are perhaps mechanically better engineered and generally more stable and precise. But as we know, life is anything but stable and precise, and I still prefer my dusty, temperamental, costly vintage machines, so I don't use any virtual synthesizers at all.

The cast of musicians who contributed to the record is also little short of miraculous: the album credits span decades of prog history, with members of Yugen and Goblin, Present and Ciccada, Stormy Six and Wobbler, Isildurs Bane and Camembert… How did you coordinate the work, and how did the pandemic affect this phase of the making of the record?

For the most part, the musicians I called on to make the record are people I've already collaborated with in various ways in the past, so knowing their particular qualities let me write parts that were, let's say, more tailor-made, which naturally leads to fewer “surprises” during the recording process. Also, by working with MIDI at the pre-production stage, I can form a fairly precise idea of what to ask the musicians for, but I often leave small areas of “controlled freedom” where the musician can move and express themselves more freely, if needed. Unlike the previous record, where I was present during almost all of the individual musicians' recording sessions, for this album I was only able to personally handle the recording for less than half of the musicians. The pandemic taught us, or rather forced us, to work remotely; the upside is that I could take a more relaxed approach to the collaborations that were very far away, ones I probably wouldn't have been able to attend in person anyway. After the composition stage and a check-in with producer Marcello Marinone, the typical modus operandi involves writing out and sending the score, complete with the relevant timbral indications, discussing any doubts, open parts or proposals with the musician, and finally assembling the recordings.

The cover of “Insolubilia” (very Escher, very “Monument Valley”) is striking, and certainly very “prog” in spirit. At the same time, it's quite different from the cover art of the other works you've been involved in. How did it come about?

Due to my professional background, I feel the connection between music and image very intensely, almost as a kind of synthesis. While writing the record, I often found myself leafing through illustration books looking for a visual inspiration that would match what I was trying to write. Almost immediately I decided that such intricate material needed to be depicted in a detailed way, inviting exploration and opening up whole worlds, without losing the playful, somewhat childlike approach typical of certain illustrative styles. In technical terms: on one hand I wanted the “meat”, on the other I didn't want the “clutter”. With a set of visual references in hand, I then asked my old university classmate Davide Longaretti (we both have degrees in Illustration) to collaborate, since he had already handled the artwork for “1000 Autumns” and I was sure he'd understand the project, and that his flat yet stylish world would be the right solution to my dilemma. After a few attempts we found the right balance between the various needs, and I'm extremely happy with the result.

Let's talk about distribution. At the moment, “Insolubilia” is available on Bandcamp, but not on other streaming platforms. Is that a deliberate choice, or simply the result of circumstance?

It's absolutely a conscious, deliberate choice. Over the past few years I've formed a fairly precise idea, both as a producer and as a consumer, of how physical and digital distribution works in the small-but-vast world of prog and, more broadly, of non-mainstream music. As far as digital goes, I find Bandcamp's model the closest thing to economic fairness. I also really like the kind of relationship it creates between audience and artist. If, as a listener, I buy directly from an artist's Bandcamp page, I know that most of my money will go to them, helping fund a possible future release. Personally, I remain attached to listening via physical media, in my case CDs, but I have nothing against digital music. I just genuinely can't understand how anyone can imagine supporting the artists they love by spending €10 a month and streaming music all day, especially knowing that the big streaming platforms hand the artist a pitiful percentage of that already pitiful sum. I fell into that trap myself in the past, but I've learned from my mistakes… I'd rather mean a lot to a few than little to many.

You're young enough to have discovered progressive rock partly through the internet, but old enough to have experienced it in the “pioneering” era of forums and filesharing. What role did the internet play in shaping you as a listener and as a musician?

As a university student I spent almost everything I had on CDs — you could still find seventies prog or jazz-rock gems in the discount bins back then. I remember that the Virgin store at Milan's Duomo had an Italian prog section stocked with Vinyl Magic and Mellow Records releases, but the most interesting, niche discoveries I made at Kaliphonia, Raoul Caprio's shop. Undoubtedly, discovering certain online forums and being able to preview records through filesharing, as well as through certain radio shows, helped me avoid buying things I wouldn't actually have liked… But if anything I ended up spending even more money on records! That said, I won't give in to nostalgia: in 2021 I consider filesharing basically pointless, since the vast majority of new releases can be previewed via streaming in a perfectly legal way. So why download them illegally? It makes no sense at all, except as a way of wanting something without paying for it.

What are the main musical changes you've noticed in the progressive world, from when you started out to today? Do you see any interesting trends worth keeping an eye on?

Keep in mind that when I started out, CDs were still being sold and streaming didn't exist. Compared to back then, the sheer number of releases today has grown enormously — or maybe we simply had no real sense back then of just how much was actually being put out in the progressive field. As a general trend, on one hand I notice an intensification of productions influenced to varying degrees by metal, even if, naturally, the results often end up quite far from “classic” metal. On the other hand, prog closer to the “symphonic” side seems to me to be sticking more faithfully to the seventies sound, often in an almost philological way, which happened much less in the nineties, perhaps partly because cheaper emulations back then didn't sound as convincing. In the last few years I've also noticed a marked thinning-out of output closer to avant/RIO: often in bands with that leaning, jazz influence takes over and shifts the focus from composition to improvisation, keeping a similar form but, in my view, actually impoverishing the content. The undergrowth of so-called post progressive is extremely dense, and here too the metal component dominates. Over the last ten years, more and more bands have emerged playing what could be filed under minimal jazz (some would say “post-jazz”); either way, I see this influencing progressive jazz-rock groups too — after all, Claudia Quintet were already doing this kind of thing twenty years ago. In fact, Norway has been drawing the attention of the progressive world in recent years, and the French scene around Dur & Doux is also worth noting.

Do you think we'll get the chance to hear the tracks from “Insolubilia” performed live?

I'd really love that — a few requests have already come in, and if we manage to line up the right conditions, not least the health situation, I'd love to bring this material to the stage and really dig into its more “live” side. Naturally the line-up will need a drastic trim compared to the studio version, as has happened before, but I'm confident we'll find the right balance between sound and feasibility.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google