Camilla Pisani - An alchemy between music and therapy
The Calabrian-born, Rome-based sound artist has established herself as one of the leading prospects of Italian experimental electronic music with a series of albums in which she has deepened her study of sound as an abstract magma to be shaped, approaching pure sound in all its communicative potential
An experimental musician and audiovisual artist, originally from Calabria but based in Rome, Camilla Pisani has established herself as one of the great promises of Italian experimental electronic music. The credit goes to a series of albums in which she has delved into the study of sound as an abstract magma to be shaped, always steering clear of any connection to melody, while approaching pure sound in all its communicative potential. Each of her pieces aims to express an idea, a feeling, as is also evident from the long titles that are already, in themselves, a manifesto of intent.
Camilla Pisani's music is therefore not pure sonic abstraction, but a tool through which the artist attempts to communicate with the listener and exorcise her own fears, both the macroscopic ones, like wars, and the smaller ones, like the impossibility of communication between individuals, toxic relationships and, more generally, the difficulty of finding one's own space of peace in the world. Pisani's music is thus, above all, a form of therapy, an inner journey, both for the artist and for anyone able to venture into her sonic material.
Pisani communicates with the listener, but does so in a cryptic way, without easing the listener's path toward understanding, as the ambient music of the Eluvium project might do (leading toward a mystical romanticism) or as the dark-ambient scene might do (leading the listener into the deepest abysses). Pisani leaves the listener free to follow their own path without necessarily pointing the way, placing herself at the listener's disposal rather than imposing herself — which makes a comparison with much of contemporary visual art or avant-garde cinema entirely legitimate.
Camilla rightly describes herself as an alchemist of sound — a musician capable of shaping sonic matter to create an environment the listener can inhabit, within which she can communicate her feelings better than words ever could. Her ties to the international ambient-drone scene are obvious, but at least on her early albums the closest points of reference are the rarefied sounds of Tim Hecker, the long drones of William Basinski and, at least in her most cosmic moments, the galaxy of kosmische musik. But, as we'll see, a rapid evolution will lead her to seek new contaminations with techno and dub-ambient without betraying her initial paradigms (the absence of melody and music understood fundamentally as a profound sensory experience).
Pisani debuted in 2017 with Verneshot, eight tracks close to a dark dark-ambient poetics, though never entirely assimilable to that scene, with the exception of the final 17-minute track, "White Can't Be Erased". The Jules Verne projectile of the title refers to the writer's pioneering idea of overcoming Earth's gravity to venture into space — a futuristic notion in 1865 (the year 'From the Earth to the Moon' was published), familiar even today. "I'm Drawing Monsters Not To Sleep Alone" opens the record with thirteen decidedly Basinski-esque minutes, at least in its first part. A long drone dissipates until it becomes ever more like a frigid electronic wind that grows in scale step by step, never quite reaching Irisarri-like majesty, though coming fairly close to that sound. In the shorter tracks, the imprint of Tim Hecker can be felt in the organ-like sound of "Sleep Party People" or in the almost sacred moments of "The Brainworm With Sad Blue Eyes I Chased", two tracks that could sit respectively on "Ravedeath, 1972" and on "Harmony In Ultraviolet". There are also tracks with dub percussive moments, such as "The Kinetic Melody Of Babel Noises". This variety of attempts reveals Camilla Pisani's restless soul, torn between trying to open up to listeners and closing in on herself, perhaps still unsure of which direction to take, but clearly gifted with talent.
Before releasing her second solo LP, she collaborated with Edoardo Cammisa, the artist behind the project Banished Pills. This symbiosis produced Lithium Salt (2018), which — as the title suggests — aims to be a journey into the human mind and into madness. This time we're in territory closer to electroacoustic music, at times imposing, as in "I Once Saw My Deathbed But My Therapist Doesn't Know", which closes with unsettling electronic whistles, and at times suggesting abstract political manifestos ("Food Is Our Cancer"), which flow into a long cosmic pulse very close to dark-ambient. "Approximate Study Of A Human Mind", at twenty-three minutes, is a more ambitious piece, perhaps even a forerunner of the masterpiece "Everywhere At The End Of Time" by the project Caretaker, a sonic study of the effects of dementia on the human mind. Pisani and Cammisa's commendable work, while not venturing into the furthest reaches of Caretaker's lost unconscious, signals a new maturity and marks the starting point for further artistic growth.
This maturity becomes evident with Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers (2019), released on cassette with a cover reminiscent of the sci-fi paperbacks of the Urania series (this is not the first time this has happened). The album stems from the idea of building an anechoic chamber (echo-free) — a room that totally absorbs the sound waves produced inside it without reflecting them, while at the same time letting no sound in from outside. We are thus looking at a utopian search for pure sound (or pure silence), unadulterated by any physical phenomenon, forcing anyone who occupies the room to focus primarily on themselves. "We Only Attract Hurt People" opens onto spatial voids with a percussive pulse that carries us into dark-ambient atmospheres which quickly give way to a new techno rhythm. Pisani's gaze is turned entirely toward the listener's inner self. This is not a journey through space, as the cover might suggest, but a journey toward oneself. A new, particularly obsessive beat opens "Insecurities Are Sliding Under My Dress", conveying precisely the sense of an inescapable inner malaise. The self Pisani addresses reveals its conflicts without any filter. Her later work is foreshadowed by "If You Can't Stay Alone, It's Because You're Empty", with dub electronics close to Loscil, by "Where Were You When The Stars Went Out", which ventures into a long synth finale, while "Cerebral Squirting" seems to open the door to possible intellectual club music solutions. Overall, it is — so far — Camilla Pisani's most ambitious and original work, one she has even described as "subversive".
2020 is a prolific year for Pisani, who releases two LPs, the first on the German label Midira Records. Frozen Alchimia is dedicated to two of her great passions (architecture and music). This new work highlights how a musician should interact with sonic matter, and thus the role they should play. For Pisani, the musician's role is comparable to that of an alchemist who shapes sounds in order to change them and constantly create new ones. Frozen Alchimia thus poses a fresh intellectual challenge, in which "Music Makes Victim" particularly stands out — as imposing as a track by Irisarri and as cinematic as one by Vangelis, nine especially adventurous minutes that have since become a fixture of her live shows. The rhythms grow more relentless in the industrial techno experiments of "The Father's Grip", even danceable at times, though set within utterly glacial atmospheres.
This constant evolution foreshadows Nausea Is A Noble Feeling (2020), which once again shifts artistic direction, drawing this time on the concept of freedom as expressed by the philosopher Heidegger — seen simultaneously as a sentence to be served for one's whole existence and as a gift that, more than anything else, defines the essence of every human being. It may be her most reference-laden LP, from the powerful wall of synths on "Your Back Is Sensitive And Full Of Sins" to, in particular, the sixteen minutes of "I've Never Been Able To Wedge My Smiles And My Panic Attacks", probably her masterpiece — a long electronic suite that seems to echo the finest work of John Carpenter. The compulsive pulse indeed seems to borrow the darkest atmospheres of "Escape From New York" before shifting, over the course of its minutes, into an extended percussive passage. The cosmic swirls of "The Heartless Roar And The Welts Of Scorn" and the techno rhythms of "Kerosenic Narcissus" close out one of the most interesting experimental electronic works released in Italy in recent years.
In 2022 Camilla Pisani delves into another of her great passions, cinema. If her music has, from the very beginning, been inseparable from imagery — and thus from cinema — Phant[as] does so explicitly, drawing on Phantasmagoria, a form of 18th-century French theatre in which images were projected onto sheets, making it effectively an ancestor project of modern cinema. The illusion created by images is therefore the album's central idea, but here the theatre's images become a metaphor for the real fears of the author and her generation — ranging from anxiety over an uncertain future to increasingly frequent toxic relationships, to a sense of powerlessness in the face of everyday tragedies, such as wars, the nightmare of nuclear conflict, or worries over the daily devastation of nature. Phant[as] is therefore Camilla Pisani's rawest and most direct work, one in which, behind the apparent illusion, she communicates real anguish translated into the Hecker-esque sounds of "Abrasive Euphoria", the dystopian landscapes of "Your Refusal Is My Comfort Zone", right up to the first direct reference to the master of ambient music with "Escape From Brian Eno's Lunar Arms". The anguish becomes palpable in "Endorphins In Oststrand", as well as in the compulsive, decidedly cinematic rhythms of "Fish Death".
Amid techno, cosmic ambient and dub, Camilla Pisani's music never stays the same, presenting itself in essence as an ongoing cathartic experience, a kind of medicine for her own suffering.
In 2026 Camilla Pisani returns with Konstellationen, an LP quite different from her recent past. While the Rome-based musician had previously explored various aspects of sound, this time the central element is unmistakably rhythm, present throughout as an obsessive pulse across the fifty-nine minutes of Konstellationen. But Pisani's compulsive beat is certainly not the kind that accompanies disco-induced stupor: it is, rather, a reflection on rhythm which, as the artist herself puts it, "is the fundamental principle linking music, astronomy and human perception, transforming disparate forms of expression into a unified creative language".
The beats make the electronic music of tracks like "A Sob Against Sadness" or "The Abstinence Of Thinking (About Me)" both physical and contemplative, simultaneously dark and luminous, like a gaze up at a night sky lit by thousands of stars (hence the title). Although one could say Konstellationen was born out of looking at the stars, it does so in a very different way from the pioneers of German cosmic music. Where the latter built cosmic soundscapes to inhabit, Pisani looks at rhythm and pulse as primordial elements of communication between human beings.
The track titles offer a glimpse into the arc of Pisani's thinking, which seems to move from sonic material imagined for solitary listening (her entire previous discography) toward music conceived as an experience of collective reflection. Music that envisions infinite cosmic landscapes ("Infinite Like Moonscapes") and a desire to open up to the world ("The Abstinence Of Thinking (About Me)", "Some Days You Become An Island"), through frantic rhythms, deep basslines, insistent beats and techno pulses. In short, an attempt to communicate beyond the walls of the self, aided also by the bodily movement that music imposes — a fundamental common thread running through every civilization and culture.
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This article is an English translation of the original Italian text, published on OndaRock.it. It was translated with the help of artificial intelligence, under the editorial responsibility of OndaRock's editor-in-chief, Claudio Fabretti.
Camilla Pisani's music is therefore not pure sonic abstraction, but a tool through which the artist attempts to communicate with the listener and exorcise her own fears, both the macroscopic ones, like wars, and the smaller ones, like the impossibility of communication between individuals, toxic relationships and, more generally, the difficulty of finding one's own space of peace in the world. Pisani's music is thus, above all, a form of therapy, an inner journey, both for the artist and for anyone able to venture into her sonic material.
Camilla rightly describes herself as an alchemist of sound — a musician capable of shaping sonic matter to create an environment the listener can inhabit, within which she can communicate her feelings better than words ever could. Her ties to the international ambient-drone scene are obvious, but at least on her early albums the closest points of reference are the rarefied sounds of Tim Hecker, the long drones of William Basinski and, at least in her most cosmic moments, the galaxy of kosmische musik. But, as we'll see, a rapid evolution will lead her to seek new contaminations with techno and dub-ambient without betraying her initial paradigms (the absence of melody and music understood fundamentally as a profound sensory experience). 
Pisani debuted in 2017 with Verneshot, eight tracks close to a dark dark-ambient poetics, though never entirely assimilable to that scene, with the exception of the final 17-minute track, "White Can't Be Erased". The Jules Verne projectile of the title refers to the writer's pioneering idea of overcoming Earth's gravity to venture into space — a futuristic notion in 1865 (the year 'From the Earth to the Moon' was published), familiar even today. "I'm Drawing Monsters Not To Sleep Alone" opens the record with thirteen decidedly Basinski-esque minutes, at least in its first part. A long drone dissipates until it becomes ever more like a frigid electronic wind that grows in scale step by step, never quite reaching Irisarri-like majesty, though coming fairly close to that sound. 
This maturity becomes evident with Inner Spaces Like Anechoic Chambers (2019), released on cassette with a cover reminiscent of the sci-fi paperbacks of the Urania series (this is not the first time this has happened). The album stems from the idea of building an anechoic chamber (echo-free) — a room that totally absorbs the sound waves produced inside it without reflecting them, while at the same time letting no sound in from outside. We are thus looking at a utopian search for pure sound (or pure silence), unadulterated by any physical phenomenon, forcing anyone who occupies the room to focus primarily on themselves.
2020 is a prolific year for Pisani, who releases two LPs, the first on the German label Midira Records. Frozen Alchimia is dedicated to two of her great passions (architecture and music). This new work highlights how a musician should interact with sonic matter, and thus the role they should play. For Pisani, the musician's role is comparable to that of an alchemist who shapes sounds in order to change them and constantly create new ones. Frozen Alchimia thus poses a fresh intellectual challenge, in which "Music Makes Victim" particularly stands out — as imposing as a track by Irisarri and as cinematic as one by Vangelis, nine especially adventurous minutes that have since become a fixture of her live shows. The rhythms grow more relentless in the industrial techno experiments of "The Father's Grip", even danceable at times, though set within utterly glacial atmospheres.
In 2022 Camilla Pisani delves into another of her great passions, cinema. If her music has, from the very beginning, been inseparable from imagery — and thus from cinema — Phant[as] does so explicitly, drawing on Phantasmagoria, a form of 18th-century French theatre in which images were projected onto sheets, making it effectively an ancestor project of modern cinema. The illusion created by images is therefore the album's central idea, but here the theatre's images become a metaphor for the real fears of the author and her generation — ranging from anxiety over an uncertain future to increasingly frequent toxic relationships, to a sense of powerlessness in the face of everyday tragedies, such as wars, the nightmare of nuclear conflict, or worries over the daily devastation of nature.
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