Enrico Falbo - Between Earth and Sky, on the Trail of the Remote

Enrico Falbo (born 1981), from Benevento, began his musical adventure in 2002 as guitarist and singer of Lamia, a band whose name is a clear nod to one of the best-loved songs of early Genesis. With a clear Radiohead lineage, but with an ear also tuned to Cure, Joy Division, At The Drive In and Italian progressive rock of the 1970s, Lamia managed to release two EPs (the self-titled one in 2005 and "Eufonia" the following year), ranking among the winners of Sanremo Rock (2006) and Rock Targato Italy (2007).

"At the time there was a lot of musical ferment in Sannio: the 'Six Day Sonic Madness' at the Guardia Sanframondi castle, the Depistaggio social centre, the Morgana Music Club in Benevento were true cult venues for the national underground music scene and beyond," recalls the musician from Campania.

In those same years, Enrico sang and wrote lyrics for Chaos Conspiracy, a post-hardcore/mathcore band responsible, for the British label Copro Records, for "Out Of Place" (2005).

Later, between 2009 and 2012, he devoted himself to post-rock with "Il Cielo di Bagdad", on which he plays guitar, viola and harmonium.

These are formative experiences, which put him in a position to write the songs destined for his first solo record, self-released in 2010 under the telling title of Sylvan Songs. 

Having set aside his rock and hardcore leanings, on this record Enrico opts for a sound marked by ancestral tensions and arcane shades, following a psychic immersion into the beautiful landscapes of his home region:

The woods, the green, the blue, the sunsets and sunrises of Sannio, Orphism, the subterranean creatures (elves, fairies, witches, spirits and demons) so dear to the magical-popular folklore of the Benevento area were the main source of inspiration for an 'other music'. I composed and performed the music using various instruments such as viola, violin, harmonium, classical and electric guitar, sarangi (an Indian bowed instrument with thirty resonance strings), taisho koto (a modernized version of the Japanese koto with typewriter-like keys), 'electronics-sampler', tambourines and rattles. The voice is always used as an instrument, as if it were reciting ancestral sound-shamanic formulas. The Sylvan Songs are songs coming from dark forests, from clearings, and they aim to express the invisible within the visible, a sort of sonic 'pan-psychism', the henosis of spirit and matter, man and nature, the 'natural' and the 'supernatural'. The generative and devouring energy of Nature has been, for me, the source of inspiration for an aural music, between darkness and light, 'mysteric' I'd even say. In short, in my musical path I find the dissonant drive of rock, the harmony and solemnity of classical music, the frenzy of ritual music and the ethereal, boundless atmosphere of cosmic music.

Sylvan Songs is a precious record, threaded with echoes of mysteries buried in time, where memory can mirror itself inside the musical architectures of an "invisible city" like Italo Calvino's Zora. Right from the record's opening seconds - percussive strings and mysteric chant - body and soul are seized and set dancing within the circle of a millennial wonder ("Viaggio verso Zora"). In the title track, by contrast, energy and metaphysical disenchantment work to reawaken the earth's most ancestral moods, weaving vibrant patterns and repeatedly unraveling their threads in a kind of veiled surrender, thus anticipating the primordial unity that, at a martial pace, distills its essence within the labyrinths of the mystical "Henosis". True to its title, "Valzer stellare" then sends pinwheels spinning within the motionless curve of a sky that, listened to closely, conceals that same radiance we so loved rediscovering in the grooves of another great "submerged" album from Italy: "Spartenza" by Sinenomine.

As the seconds roll by, unease and chamber-music austerity take shape ("Canto elfico dell'aurora"), solemnity and enchantment fuse together ("La solitudine è vento"), the paths of myth are climbed to stare into the eyes of "he who heals through light" ("Fabula di Orfeo"), before getting lost in the swirls of "Espiazione della luce", barely three and a half minutes that also bring to mind Black Tape For A Blue Girl. And while "La danza delle fate" resembles a lullaby arranged by Colleen, the aching "Overture del non-ritorno" has the task of bringing down the curtain on a beautiful adventure made of sounds and visions, in which the words are simply primordial allusions to the unspoken and, as such, enigmatic and elusive themselves.

All the tracks on the record are 'in progression', endlessly opening up toward 'something other than themselves' and toward 'no return'. This is a backdrop of metaphysical resonance, an emotional tonality that pervades every composition. I think it can come close to the Vedic 'Moksha', to 'letting flow' understood as the dissolution of every 'returning' into the manifested world, as liberation from every 'cycle', as surrender to a kind of 'nostalgia' that disorients every nostalgic feeling.

Having released what, all things considered, is one of the most interesting and overlooked records in Italian music of recent years, Enrico resurfaces in 2013 with the self-produced EP Muse, a collection - released in just 100 copies - of soundtracks recorded from 2009 onward for short films and for art installations by Davide Pannullo, Alessia Cocca, Piergiorgio Romano and Gianluca Francesca (ArchiAttack).

Thanks to this experience, Enrico also gets the chance to explore neoclassical sounds, as well as textures closer to dark-ambient (just listen, for instance, to the three movements of "Mundus Patet"). In a piece like "De-Materia", on the other hand, he returns to his youthful passion for post-rock.

In 2016, it's instead time for his debut on Vulpiano Records with the single "Il giorno del richiamo estatico", containing two long tracks: the title track, nine minutes of post-industrial pulses and distant mystical echoes that build tension before resolving into a fade-out; and the hypnotic minimalist device of "Del remoto".

The following year, a full seven years after his debut, the artist returns to the scene with Tranceformer (2017), released on cassette by Vulpiano Records and enriched by the collaboration of Attilio Novellino, who handled the mastering.

The record, a true "trance ritual", "recorded in a single unified flow across six live-take sessions, with Loopstation, Indian bowed instruments (dilruba and esraj) processed through delay/reverb, tribal percussion, electric guitars and synthesizers", draws inspiration, besides Faust and Popol Vuh, also from the drone music of Tony Conrad and Angus Maclise.

Having thus abandoned the ancestral folk of Sylvan Songs to focus on a fascinating mix of cosmic music and tribal ambient, Tranceformer opens with the epic ride of "Dei divini", which brings to mind the most metronomic scores of Klaus Schulze - a name that can just as well be invoked for the more relaxed, yet still clearly metaphysically charged, developments of "Trance-Forme". In "Prakriti", ostinato percussion forms the backdrop to a shifting panorama, with a shamanic voice lurking in half-light and the usual sparks of India. Percussion again, but this time moving at a slow ritualistic pace, frames the scope of "Psychostasis", where the filtered voice takes on sinister tones. And while the influence of Indian music is even more evident in the reprise of "Del remoto", "Tejas" closes the circle by mediating, in a minor key, between ritualism and electronics.

What fascinates and unsettles me most about music isn't so much its aesthetic dimension, but its 'ecstatic' dimension. I'd like to make clear that 'Tranceformer' isn't the result of a musical syncretism that outwardly combines several genres just to seem interesting and accessible, but stems from the idea of a synthesis that lives within the interiority of my musical and existential search. It isn't about re-proposing traditional music in a modern key. My musical intent isn't sterile contamination for the sake of performance alone, but a return to the Origin for an original, originary sound.

The experience of Tranceformer coincided with the period in which Enrico began seriously studying Indian music and some of its most important instruments.

I discovered Indian instruments during a period when I was searching for acoustic instruments with a "non-electrified" and more immediate reverberation and resonance, easily portable for playing outdoors and letting the soul travel to the evocative places of my region (a clearing, at the foot of an age-old tree, deep in the woods, at night in the mountains near a fire, by a small stream, or in an abandoned ghost village, near an ancient bridge, on a riverbank, etc.). Through my study of the viola, I knew that ancient Renaissance and Baroque instruments had "sympathetic" resonance strings (as in the Archlute, or the Viola d'Amore in the 17th century), but I was almost unaware of the existence of Indian bowed instruments. Sympathetic strings vibrate 'in sympathy' (that is, without being touched) when the instrument is played, because they are tuned to the fundamental 'mode' of the melody; but I also find the effect of the beating, or natural chorus effects, equally fascinating and truly unique, caused by the never-quite-perfect tuning of the strings. One day, while I was deep in my research on YouTube, I stumbled almost by chance on a rare video of Ustad Sabri Khan, barely a couple of minutes long, in which the great musician plays a Jod Alap from raga Darbari on an extraordinary bowed instrument, the Sarangi ('Saranghi', which translates roughly as 'hundreds of sounds' and indeed has over 30 resonance strings!), and I was stunned by its purely acoustic ability to generate drones, depth, and unique, remote, mysterious reverberations and resonances. I don't know, maybe simply listening to that melody was like a spell, or perhaps a kind of initiation! Then I discovered Ranadhir Roy's esraj, and from there began a wonderful journey into the sounds and drones of India and into ragas, one that still continues today. Certain readings were also important, including Jean During's "Musique et extase", Gilbert Rouget's "Musique et transe", Marius Schneider's "La musica primitiva", and Ananda K. Coomaraswamy's "The Dance of Shiva".

After yet another long hiatus, nonetheless filled with his usual, tireless sonic research, Enrico made himself heard again in 2020 with the anguished raga of "Planktón", while two years later came the desolate, Indian-tinged dirge of "Arunachala" (for sitar and tablas), again released on Vulpiano Records and dedicated to the mountain of Shiva and to Sri Ramana Maharshi, metaphysician of Advaita Vedānta.

Meanwhile, struck by a sudden flash of inspiration, he opened the doors to an evocative cosmic-folk, whose traces he followed all the way to his third album.

One fine day I found myself writing the lyrics for the track 'Aure', as if taking dictation. I hadn't written songs since my Lamia days, and so I went back a little to my musical roots. Compared to 'Sylvan Songs' and 'Tranceformer', 'De-Stare' is sung in Italian, with lyrics I think of as 'traces', hints and connections within my own 'philosophical-metaphysical' path. In the end, I played the tracks for Dylan Iuliano, a young composer of electro-acoustic music from Sannio, visionary and hugely talented. 'De-Stare', in fact, came out on his label Bulbless Records, which also released 'Lick The Witch', a compilation gathering a full 30 years of electronic music from Sannio - music that has 'crossed borders'.

The title De-Stare also reflects his most recent fascination with the thought of Emanuele Severino, which he explored in depth through his studies in theoretical philosophy at the University of Salerno.

Of course, Severino's language is highly evocative, quite difficult, very rigorous, but poorly understood and consequently misread, in my opinion, even by eminent philosophers and scientists. 'De-Stare', in Latin, is the intensive-iterative form of the verb 'stare' ('to stand/be') and indicates the 'authentic standing' of Truth, 'the eternity of every being'. Truth understood as Destiny, according to him, is not epistemic truth as understood by past philosophy and modern science ('epi-steme' = the hyperuranian 'standing above' of the 'immutable laws' that govern the reality of becoming), but rather 'standing within the heart of things', of every event, of all beings, even within the heart of those who reject the Truth. Destiny, in this sense, carries an unprecedented meaning for Western civilization (and not only!)

It's "Aure" that opens De-Stare, an album that is once again precious, driven by the will to express in music the "Resonance of the Remote", "which is a world apart" - the artist is keen to point out - "from the consumeristic, conformist, frivolous, generic, standardized non-listening that seems to be spreading with ever greater force, violence and efficiency across the contemporary world". With its magnetic cosmic ritualism, "Aure" lays down the guidelines along which all the other tracks on the album move, starting with the moving "Sentiero del giorno", a Parmenidean title that heralds shamanic enchantments.

Between echoes of Alan Sorrenti's "Aria", the most kraut and "mysteriosophic" Battiato of "Sulle corde di Aries", but also the most mystical Giovanni Lindo Ferretti, these grooves keep flowing through the abyssal refractions of "Dimore" and "Non ci perderemo mai" (the latter, however, backed by a more rock-leaning arrangement), passing through "Evocazioni dall'oscura età" and solemn marches toward Revelation ("Giubilo divino"), which the closing title track turns into a cosmic drift.

When, on the other hand, electronics take over, out come the pulsing, spectral "Aion" (born from a collaboration with fellow countryman Forever Alien aka Johnny Jay) and the android tarantella of "Vāmana", dedicated to Aldo Colucciello, anthropologist and scholar of Indian culture, and probably inspired by the raga "Malkauns", one of the oldest in Indian classical music.

The album is further enriched by guest contributions from Alessandro Paolo Lombardo (tammorra, tambourines), Michele Intorcia (bass and didgeridoo), the aforementioned Forever Alien (vocals, synth), Francesca Fallarino (backing vocals), and the duo Edith/Eleni on backing vocals.

The Destiny of the Eternal Ones

illuminates our silence.

In these cosmic spaces,

among Celestial Hierarchies

we dismember our Bodies,

in the Infinite Unity

nothing dies…

nothing dies…

("Aure")

For a few months now, Enrico Falbo has been recording new tracks, which he's gathering under the title "Paranatellonta" (from the Greek "that which rises together"), "a word used in ancient astrology to refer to the simultaneous rising of stars, zodiacal constellations and para-zodiacal ones known to the Sumerians, Babylonians and Akkadians". He's not yet sure whether these tracks will come together into a new record, but in the meantime things are moving, and his research into Indian instruments continues unabated:

At the moment, I'm 'getting acquainted' with a new Indian bowed instrument, similar in size to the sitar, designed by guru Shri Ranadhirr Roy between the Seventies and Eighties at Shantiniketan, the Ashram (later an international university) founded by the great Indian philosopher, poet and musician Rabindranath Tagore. It's an evolution of the classical esraj, a 17th-century Hindustani instrument. It was Tagore himself who saved this extraordinary instrument from extinction: in 20th-century India, almost no one played it anymore!

My new esraj has an even wider range of frequencies and resonance than the dilruba (the instrument I used on my albums 'Tranceformer' and 'De-Stare'), thanks to a larger body with some additional holes and a second "tumba" (an open resonator) behind the pegbox. The instrument has 21 strings in total: 15 sympathetic strings, 3 drone strings and 3 for the melody. This instrument will open further 'sonic portals', pushing my artistic and musical path with even greater enthusiasm towards 'the oblivion of sound' (echoing the title of a wonderful book on drone music by Harry Sword), to recover melodies, sounds and visions that are neither Eastern nor Western, but more primordial and remote. In short, what interests me is not mere fusion!

So there's nothing left to do but wait, and keep our ears open!

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