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Luigi Porto is an Italian musician and composer who, for several years now, has left Italy to move to New York, where he has built a rewarding career as a musician marked by numerous collaborations. Once again in 2019 I got in touch with him to discuss the albums he found most interesting over the course of the year, as well as to take our usual look back at the main events of the past twelve months.

Hi Valerio, and thanks for thinking of me again this year - the good thing about having a fixed date, as you put it, is that you try not to get caught completely unprepared. Musically speaking, from what I've been able to observe, the 2010s were a kind of reaction to the previous twenty years, when a certain amateurism was almost treated as a virtue - the legacy of garage rock, where urgency was everything and craft was secondary. The dominance of the former over the latter had given rise to lo-fi, indie, and mythical figures like Daniel Johnston, Will Oldham, Jeff Magnum. Much of the music circulating back then was instinctive, almost unaware of itself, lacking the harmonic and formal refinement of the '70s - and, whatever people may say, of the '80s too - but making up for it with a very strong expressive awareness. Then we slid to the opposite extreme: the triumph of professionalism, both in the mainstream, where artists emerge only after being deemed fit for purpose worldwide by a panel of experts, and in the underground, where productions are often perfectionist and band members are more often than not professional musicians coming from the world of jazz and classical music. This has brought back a certain compositional refinement, but also a general sterility and the inevitable loss of that naive urgency which had characterized the previous period. So I chose records that, even though they come from musically accomplished artists, move back in that direction, in an attempt to capture what might be an emerging synthesis - though we still don't know for sure.

A few days ago we were talking about elections around the world, Brexit, and you laid out some very pessimistic theories. It seems like this decade has taken a turn that looks hard to stop. Do you really see it that bleak? And what could a musician (or an artist), in their own small way, actually do?

More than pessimism, perhaps what I was arguing was the inevitability of the contemporary political drift, the classic right-wing wind that blows hard once it starts blowing, but in this case it's a very complex situation, because certain tendencies that mix self-sufficiency and xenophobia are also, as we now know, the result of years of mistaken policies on the democratic front. To complicate matters, since it's easier to be against something than for something, these tendencies, which seem to be the only response to accepting market globalization, attract if not the sympathy then at least the curiosity of some who call themselves left-wing, but that's really more a matter of mental laziness. It's truly hard to be left-wing today, to manage to distinguish and reject the epigones of Blairism while at the same time not falling into the traps of nationalism and easy fascination with strongmen. It's like driving a race car over rough terrain: it takes a tremendous effort to go straight, to be anti-capitalist but also internationalist, to try to understand something about integration and the great movements of human masses without giving in, on one side, to a refusal to analyze the causes, and on the other, if not to xenophobia, then to conspiracy theories (I'm thinking of the various Kalergi, Soros plans and so on). It's no surprise that a party setting out a programme that responds to this complexity fails to win more than a handful of votes, or loses dramatically (Corbyn).

The absurd thing is that my generation was the one of the no-global movement and the Seattle protests, whose message, considered at the time at best utopian if not dangerously extremist, is today effectively shared, albeit in different terms, precisely by those who in 2001 were on the side of the Genoa police headquarters, while on the other side, where No Logo banners once waved, people now use words like branding and employ communication techniques straight out of marketing, even when they are naturally outside the market, I'm thinking of artists. It's as if the antagonists, who used to be the outlaws, today have to be the calm, almost prudish ones, because the bad guys from the comics are now the ones in power.

Conspiracy theories, then, are misleading drifts, because they tend to put a face and a name on an enemy, instead of recognizing that the enemy is a doctrine, not human beings. And since certain keywords are used by "conspiracy theorists", certain arguments automatically lose their meaning, when instead they should be tackled seriously.

What can we poor musicians do? I don't know, certainly try to have critical awareness, without taking refuge in a supposed asceticism, which I don't believe in. We're not fine analysts, but we have to say our piece, we have to try, even at the risk of coming across as presumptuous, but at least with the courage to put ourselves on the line. The song I like least in Battiato's entire discography is "I'm That" from "Ten Stratagems", where he distances himself from religion and politics, giving as his reason "because I'm a musician". Now, to me, this passive narcissism is truly presumptuous, with all due respect and admiration for Battiato. An artist is not "above the fray", has no special rights, and asceticism and spiritualism are not incompatible with being in the world, and I like courageous commitment - not to be confused, of course, with convenient commitment. And too bad if that then leads to the extremes of the Seventies, when a Battisti who didn't talk about politics was attacked by kids in TV studios, when you got expelled from a party because you discussed an inconvenient artist - I prefer those excesses to guilty disengagement, or to the independent artist who uses the same marketing techniques as the successful pop artist, without even having the money for it. That's just ridiculous, and I've thought so for twenty years.

At least two, maybe three of the albums you've chosen are marked by high levels of darkness, grief and pessimism. Two, meanwhile, have a connection to classical music, among them "Lingua Ignota", an extreme LP born out of an extreme family situation. Doesn't it strike you as out of step with the times that, in a world where TV pushes the model of the ever-smiling young consumer who never asks questions and is maybe even a bit dim, there are artists who manage to dig so deep into their own depression?

Right, you see? Do you remember that critique typical of the end of the last century, which dwelt on the horror smoldering beneath the ashes of the stereotype of the outwardly happy, problem-free American family? That American family has spread to the whole world, from advertising to social media the rhetoric of the winner is flaunted in every field, and so I chose these raw or cruel answers, as usual not so much, or not necessarily, for the intrinsic value of the albums - I don't put much stock in charts, but above all I don't think I listen to enough music, and I miss out on a lot of stuff - but precisely as a kind of bet, and to try to stay consistent with a theme that interests me, which this year is precisely this dichotomy between expressive urgency and musical skill. I'll avoid mentioning "Ghosteen" by Nick Cave, which has already been talked about extensively.

Xiu Xiu – “Girl With Basket Of Fruit“

Xiu Xiu are an example of how you can be eclectic, noisy, experimental and whatever else you like, while keeping it all consistently at the service of the aforementioned urgency, which in the case of Stewart's band is a rather dramatic, desperate, schizophrenic urgency. Xiu Xiu prove that experimenting doesn't necessarily mean "let's do something weird for weirdness's sake", but can mean venturing into the territories of the absurd to build a kind of "inside of the mind" through sound. On "Girl With Basket Of Fruit" the band's habit of crafting songs that are mental constructs incorporates elements that also come from the mainstream - there are echoes of trap, of reggaeton, of that music which, even if you're an ascetic, an intellectual, an aristocrat, a priest, whatever you like, you simply can't pretend not to hear every day blasting from car stereos on the street or playing in any corner store, if you live in California. It's music that, even if you don't like it, you end up listening to more than the music you do like, because it's a forced listen. Well, that's exactly what they've turned into an instrument, and to me they've used that instrument brilliantly.

The Murder Capital – “When I Have Fears“

Another album set to feature in a fair number of year-end lists, if I've understood how year-end lists work, is this one by Irish band Murder Capital, which is nothing more than an honest post-punk record, well played and with excellent lyrics, which, also thanks to the music videos, has that extra dramatic edge that makes it intense even while remaining accessible - a trait found only in post-punk - and leaves you with the feeling of listening to something "important". It might just be a sentimental thing, but I hear in it the old Anglo-Saxon working class, the greyness that animated Joy Division in Manchester - a band that is, moreover, an unimpeachable touchstone for this Dublin band, who manage to distill that influence in just the right way, far more coherently than other bands that have recently been compared to the guys from "Unknown Pleasures". They're not afraid to reference them explicitly, even in the video for "Green And Blue", literally recalling the look of Curtis and co., shirt tucked into high-waisted trousers, short hair and so on. Stravinsky said that bad musicians copy, good musicians steal, and this seems to be exactly the case.

Lingua Ignota - "Caligula"

You're the one who introduced me to this. It's a truly extreme album, not suited to every moment, to put it mildly. Kristin Hayter is another Californian, like Xiu Xiu - it's curious how California, palm trees, beaches, the California of "La La Land", San Francisco, can also be the home of things like death-rock, Lingua Ignota and Xiu Xiu - Arnold Schoenberg lived and composed there for years. A multi-instrumentalist, Hayter had a classical training, and you can hear in her work plenty of the compositional devices that characterize American art music of her generation, all those "devices" borrowed from minimalism and from certain kinds of film music. Lying beneath this cultured awareness is a tormented existence made of domestic violence, trauma and depression, which Kristin lays bare as directly as possible ("I Don't Eat, I Don't Sleep"). You already have an excellent review of this on the site, so there's no point in me writing another one - what interests me is pointing out that Lingua Ignota is, right now, the representative of horror, madness, depression and trauma in the life of a white American woman, without mincing words; she doesn't even need to retrace any of the usual elements of femininity in music, she goes straight to the heart of horror, using music - which she knows how to write and play - to split herself open like a watermelon.

Michael Kiwanuka - "Kiwanuka"

Here's someone the same age as Kristin Hayter, but male, black and British - even though he's made a record so black it sounds like it came out of the crossing of 125th Street and Lenox. An album aware of tradition, respectful, but powerful, committed, direct yet refined, it's soul music that speaks directly to its community, it's Black music, the kind where social protest, suffering and bodily movement are one and the same thing. I don't think I'm exaggerating if I say it's something truly hard to grasp for those who aren't Black - white people intellectualize it, understand it through analysis, but never quite grasp it directly. Kiwanuka grew up far from that America, and at times you can tell it's that "English" strain of soul that had also characterized, for example, Amy Winehouse's productions - I'm thinking of "Cold Little Heart" - but elsewhere he manages to be "one of them" in a way that borders on the mystical.

Michael Tilson and San Francisco Symphony Orchestra – Symphony 3 and 4, Charles Ives

To me, Charles Ives isn't just the greatest American composer and probably my favorite composer, he's also the most modern "architect" of music who ever existed. Often, even and especially by those who discovered and admired him, Ives has been associated with naivety, with amateurism (he was an insurance man his whole life, and a very successful one at that - he was, among other things, the inventor of door-to-door insurance sales); Bernstein even used the term primitivism. In reality, Ives had an immense orchestral awareness, in my view truly superior to anyone else's, but unlike anyone else he was never interested in "pure" music and never needed to use the tools of composition in a purely musical sense - everything in him springs from visions, everything in him becomes an object, and his compositions are layers upon layers upon layers of objects. The Third Symphony, still derived from Beethovenian models, is worth listening to in order to understand the Fourth (and last), which is one of the endpoints of this detachment from music understood as music, from harmony, from counterpoint, from all those codifications that the avant-gardes later rejected only to simply replace them with other codifications. Ives knew how to weave webs of music around anything, but in his lifetime he never displayed this as an end in itself, never built tedious theories around it - instead he hid it so well that he was considered someone who barely knew anything about music, even though as a young man he had been, among other things, the most sought-after organist in New England. A review of one of his pieces, published while he was still alive, read: "Mr. Ives's music can be heard in any home where a cat or an infant has access to the piano." There is no short circuit between professionalism and expressive urgency more intense than Charles Ives. And Michael Tilson seems to have understood this perfectly in this recording.

Out of competition, but only because he's a friend and plays on my records, and I've been listening to it a lot these past few days, and it fits perfectly with the thread running through this list, let me flag the very recent "Raven Waltz" by Al The Coordinator. Incidentally, this is the second year in a row that one of the albums I'm recommending to you was introduced to me by him (Kiwanuka, last year it was John Prine's album). Like the Kiwanuka record, this is an English album of American Black music, Raven Waltz is an Italian album of American white music. Deep, songs accompanied by guitar or banjo and few other sporadic instruments, of a subtle psychedelia, the kind of music that sounds like it was played sitting in an armchair, hunched over a fireplace. "I Always Wanted To Stay At Home" could be an outtake from Neil Young's "On The Beach", were it not for a decidedly rougher voice; it has an extremely simple lyric that to me resonates a great deal with the decade now coming to an end. Intimate songs, but not naive, small stories but not fragile ones, played, in fact, by a professional of the six-string, who nonetheless puts his technique entirely at the service of the song, even on the seemingly adolescent "Smile Today".

Thank you for the valuable advice. Before saying goodbye, I'd like to ask: what plans do you have for 2020, and what do you hope happens for your career as a musician over the next decade?

Thanks to you, though really it's you who recommends things to me. 2020 will definitely see the new album, which I can already tell you will be called "Tell Uric", because we try to stay away from marketing logic, including that nonsense of keeping things secret to build up anticipation. It's an album on which I've also gone back to singing. On the orchestral front, there's the autumn staging of Anita di Laguna, whose orchestral suite has already had three recent premières (Kazakhstan, the Casino di Sanremo, and La Croisette in Cannes). The opera, which is anything but an opera in the classical sense of the term, will be presented in full in New York and Philadelphia, preceded by a few excerpts at Carnegie Hall on March 3rd. I've also just finished recording the music for the film "Uljhan", which will come out in the spring, and I'm currently scoring a great Italian documentary about Sicilian puppets. I think I've told you everything I know for now — in the next decade I simply hope to stay alive, and to keep doing what I do. We're also pushing back against this silly idea of showing ambition at all costs, and I'd like to make a case for being satisfied and content with what you have. At most, I think I'll play a bit more in public, which is something I've never been that interested in and have done relatively little of, but maybe at 38 it's the right time.

See you soon, happy solstice — since that's today, as we're writing to each other — and happy start of the decade!

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16/11/2025