Galati - Towards Absolute Silence

Roberto Galati is an Italian experimental musician who has used – taking it to its extreme consequences – the theme of the journey as both means and metaphor for an arduous itinerary into his own innermost self. His travels to the most remote and inhospitable places on earth have driven him to create a long catalogue straddling cosmic ambient and instrumental post-rock, absolutely unique within Italian discography. Galati is, in fact, first and foremost a traveller and a photographer (several of his photos seem inspired by Salgado), and only subsequently a musician, in the sense that his music is utterly unthinkable except as a later stage of the journey. Like a true artist, he needs a powerful external stimulus, visual and spiritual, an absolute and solitary immersion in an unknown world, in order to translate into music those powerful sensations that the vast, uninhabited spaces where he lives for long stretches of time are able to evoke.

The journey is therefore the preparatory tool for the music: just as a painter needs a model to create his work, Galati needs an extreme place, real yet at the same time mythologized by imagination, in order to create his compositions. An impressionist model of composing music that has had great protagonists within the ambient scene and in instrumental music in general.

He began writing music at a very young age in 1989, with self-produced amateur recordings later released on compilations such as Wistful, Introspective Home-Recorded Bedroom Space Rock Music (2006) and Wide Open Spaces (2013). His subsequent discography can be divided into several phases, based on the places that gave rise to his works.

Greenland – The Ice

Galati's first LPs are influenced by ice, in particular by the frozen landscapes of Greenland. The first is Floe Edge from 2012, featuring five long ambient-drone compositions accompanied by as many videos, culminating in the final vortex of the fifth, twenty-four-minute-long piece.

Listening to the tracks while simultaneously watching the videos is a genuine travel experience, one that captures the sense of extreme frontier that Galati manages to channel into his glacial compositions, emphasizing the more solemn and luminous aspect in the three central pieces and the darker, more desolate one in the first and fifth.

In 2013 he released Godhavn, a work made up of three long electronic symphonies, once again born out of the icy landscapes of Greenland. The glaciers, extreme and utterly silent places, push Galati to focus on the apparent stillness of a world that is, in fact, close to disappearing due to the continuous melting of the ice. Galati thus tries to recreate that imaginary sound, which is nonetheless real (if amplified to infinity). The three compositions still clearly bear the influence of Klaus Schulze and, at various points, recall the colossal space journeys of the most famous of the cosmic couriers.

Tibet – Mother Earth

The subsequent journey to the glaciers of Tibet led to the recording of Mother (2014), a more introspective LP in which the author reflects on how anthropocentrism distorts our perception of reality. Mother – which obviously stands for Mother Earth – thus becomes the only eternal constant underlying every existence, which, individually, is instead destined to disappear within that whole which is precisely the Earth.

After the first two long, monolithic compositions, we arrive at the third, with an unexpected percussive and ecstatic finale, through to the fifth composition, where an overdubbed vocal line gives a new perspective to Galati's music.

Pakistan

Frost and extreme silence are once again the theme of Gletscher (2015), where Pakistan is added alongside Greenland and Tibet. The tracks become shorter and more numerous (ten in all), closing out a phase of Galati's discography while enriching his sonic palette. The grandeur of "Siachen I" is one example, as are the more chilling compositions like "Hopar" or "Kiattuut".

In 2017 he began a collaboration with Federico Mosconi, a musician more attuned to electroacoustic and noise sounds. Their first album, Penombra, is heavily influenced by Mosconi's noise aesthetic.

Islanda

Silence (As A Din) (2018) again puts silence at its core, but this time it stems from a new journey to Iceland, the land of silence. Galati's music is now different, reaching its fullest potential. Perhaps more aware of his own means, he explores sounds that combine the usual ambient atmospheres with imposing new post-rock structures, drawing on the rhythms of Loscil, the asymmetries of Tim Hecker, right up to unspoken attempts at Godspeed You! Black Emperor-style crescendos.

Guitars, violin and keyboards build grand, distant worlds, enriched by the voice of Stella Talami (in the third part) and the harp notes of Sara Masiero Serra. Four great streams of consciousness, at least two of them monumental (the first running twenty minutes, the third twenty-five), break away from typical ambient atmospheres to unfold into more chaotic and ambitious territory, without ever fully breaking free — like a scream defused by the gaze of a hostile nature that makes us understand our own smallness. Attempts at crescendo are crushed by the overwhelming silence, with guitars repeating patterns (the chord repeated from the tenth minute of the third part onward) that merge depression and grandeur (the subtle echoes of “Midrange” by Labradford in the first five minutes of the first part). Between plucked strings in the style of Mike Oldfield and majestic sonic architectures of overlapping keyboards and guitars, what emerges is the very essence of nature — not a friend but a powerful enemy to behold, in the manner of Werner Herzog's “Aguirre” — fascinated, but with due fear and respect.

In 2019 his collaboration with Mosconi continues with the album Dissolve, a long ambient-noise composition split into five parts.

Asia

New journeys take him from Afghanistan to Kashmir, drawing him ever closer to silence and to the true solitude of natural landscapes untouched by human presence. The sight of austere mountains, indifferent to human activity, inexorably confronts man with his limits, and thus with his own fragility. The towering mountain ranges of Afghanistan and Tajikistan inspired Fragility (2019). Fragility is precisely the feeling that can arise from witnessing a nature so imposing and wild, a silence and solitude so pervasive as to feel utterly removed even from the most unusual experiences possible within our society.

Galati's music grows richer with different instruments. Nature imposes this grandiloquence through the monolithic “Irshad Uween” and the exorbitant length of the glacial “Sarhad-e Broghil” (twenty-seven minutes). Seven tracks to be contemplated, as if standing before a spectacle that overwhelms us; the post-rock elements that had made the difference on the previous LP Silence (As A Din) tend to disappear in favor of a solemnity built on keyboards and guitars (“Sakar Sar,” with its near-psychedelic guitars, or the unsettling synths of “Koe Mandaras”). Whether the journey is real, made of earth and miles, or is instead purely internal, is a question only Galati could answer. But the impression is that one can actually enter this journey, as in the final twelve minutes of “Noshaq,” which, after an opening evoking horrid Transylvanian abysses à-la Popol Vuh's “Nosferatu,” settles down as if gathering itself for what is the true goal of the journey: the rediscovery of ourselves within silence.

Italy

2022 is an important year for Galati, in some ways the year of his homecoming. In June he releases Oneiric, his LP most influenced by international ambient music, and perhaps his most mature work. Dedicated to the landscapes of the Karst, Oneiric recalls, more than any previous album, the typical sounds of Rafael Anton Irisarri (“Endless Space”) and Tim Hecker (“Motionless Ocean”), while never abandoning what have always been the themes of Galati's music. At times it feels like a sunnier sound (“White Mantle”) compared to previous years, but the icy electronic wind of “Abysses” suddenly proves otherwise.

This homecoming and this long personal diary continue with Alps, his second LP of 2022. Still marked by strong continuity in its themes, it also reveals a stronger presence of guitar (“White And Blue”) that once again brings him closer to minimal post-rock. What's missing, however, are the typical ambient layerings, which give way to spare guitar textures reminiscent of Labradford's apocalyptic scenarios.

If Galati is capable of hearing the sounds of glaciers and mountains, this time he seems to hear the pain caused by their inexorable shrinking due to rising temperatures.

After Alps, Roberto Galati returns to try to capture the sound of mountains with Cold As A February Sky. The majesty of mountain ranges, this time the Karst plateau on the border between Italy and Slovenia, remains the central theme of Galati's music, once again enchanted by absolute silence (always the true object of his research) and by the sacred immensity of these rocky monuments, which ought to make man understand his true place within nature.

Cold As A February Sky (2024) marks a shift in Galati's discography. First and foremost, the presence of guitar, never so prominent, with a meeting point between ambient and post-rock never so pronounced since Silence (As A Din) (2018). “As Still As These High Mountains” is pure guitar-driven post-rock, certainly slow and close to the idea of rhythmless music like ambient, but it sounds rather unexpected within Galati's usual discography.

Overall, the Italian composer seems to have found a more intimate and optimistic meeting point with the subject of his studies. Everything sounds more airy, as if he has rediscovered the ability to see and internalize outward beauty. Tracks like “That Day Exploded Silently All Around Me” and “If There's A Spell That We Shouldn't Break” have a luminous aesthetic that conveys the monumental majesty of the mountains.

The union between man and nature now seems absolute and inextricable, even though contemporary society appears to have drawn an apparently indelible line between the two. In this sense Galati truly is an alien in our times: his music doesn't celebrate the present state of things but exactly its opposite. And that makes him all the more interesting.

Drift marks the start of his collaboration with Francis Gri, an album born out of a dialectic between two very different musicians and a strong dualism that its creators describe as disorientation and beauty. It's an encounter that avoids any easy synthesis, finding its expressive strength precisely in that tension.

Roberto Galati, who has devoted his entire career to the wilder side of nature, pursues a search for disorientation: his textures strip away coordinates, remove any foothold. The tracks move like dense fog, crossed by drones that offer no stable center and generate instability. Galati works through fractures, cracks that make the listening experience fragile and unstable.

Francis Gri, on the other hand, comes from a career more focused on the hidden, magical side of sound, in search of a sudden beauty that can arise almost by chance from the encounter of different notes and timbres. Gri seeks beauty without relying on reassuring melodies: he digs into the fragility of a sound that is matter, and that disintegrates even as it's being played. His contribution doesn't soften the picture, but makes it more complex and layered.

If the theme of those albums was the ecstasy of glimpsing a world governed by timescales infinitely longer than a single human life, by mountain ranges so vast and ancient as to surpass the very concept of time that one person can grasp, Dust (2026) tackles the opposite theme: the ultimate crumbling into dust even of what might seem eternal to the human mind.

Galati's music changes here, becoming sharper and more immediate. There are no long preambles: the tracks get straight to the point, with sudden synth notes ("Worn By The Wind, Lost To The Ages") kicking off compositions in an almost unexpected way ("Dreams Lay Buried"). Noise and ghostly melodies coexist before dissolving into notes wandering into nothingness ("The Ephemeral Grit Of Time"), or reassembling into impenetrable walls of sound ("Millions And Millions Of Years"), or again into melancholy nocturnal melodies ("Enchanted By These Silent Ruins").

This dualism (serenity and chaos) reaches its apotheosis in the closing pairing of "The Ephemeral Grit Of Time" (the only entirely acoustic track) and "Storm Of Stones" (an immersion into disintegrating chaos). That disintegration can already be felt in the sparse guitar notes of "A Moment When Nothing Happens And Everything Is Revealed", which build a vague atmosphere destined to vanish, swallowed by a sea of electronic dust.

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