A record of work, places, and questions that continue to return.
A notebook is where work begins before it becomes a book, a film, or a piece of music. These are fragments collected during research, travel, conversations, and the slow process of making.
Read chronologically, explored by category, or followed through recurring series that connect places, films, music, and research across time.
Featured Entry
A winter afternoon in Villa Borghese with Michele Malea and his Rolleiflex. The moment the sape became part of my physical language, photographed by a friend who knew how to listen through a camera. This entry opens the music notebook, tracing three chapters of learning an instrument—the first sound, the journey home, and the afternoon another artist saw what was quietly becoming.
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Featured Entries
A journey to Sarawak to learn from Mathew Ngau Jau, one of the great Sape masters of Borneo, and the sound that quietly altered the direction of everything that followed.
A documentary portrait in the Alps that slowly became a meditation on art, solitude, and the thin boundary between observation and myth.
Recording two friends singing Renaissance madrigals in a Romanesque church in Tuscany, and wondering whether a building can remember every voice that has ever risen into it.
Complete Archive
A composition written for a short film, recorded and set aside, now heard again after years. The music outlasted its original purpose. Some pieces are not completed when they are recorded; they are completed when they find the image they have been waiting for.
A melody written in Rome becomes something else when it travels across the world and passes through another human being. A composition, a distant collaboration, and the recognition that some music must pass through a player before it becomes itself.
An apprenticeship in New York recording studios, the snow, the jazz clubs, and a Grammy certificate that recorded the fact of the work but not what the work taught me: a way of listening I have carried ever since.
An afternoon in Villa Borghese with my friend Michele Malea, his Rolleiflex, and the sape. Photographs taken when I was still discovering my relationship with the instrument — not a portrait of a musician, but a conversation between a person, an instrument, and a city.
Watching Mathew Ngau Jau carve an instrument from a single piece of Bornean timber, and understanding that I was not simply buying a sape but entering into a relationship with its maker, its place, and its tradition.
Six musicians in a rehearsal room in Puglia, stopping and starting through the same passages until the music became something none of them could have arrived at alone.
Visiting the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna with a microphone, and discovering that a museum is an instrument played continuously by everyone inside it.
A journey to Sarawak to learn from Mathew Ngau Jau, one of the great Sape masters of Borneo, and the sound that quietly altered the direction of everything that followed.
A Bornean sape, tabla, oud, guitar, and saxophone, playing together inside the British Ambassador's Residence in Rome, and what happens when instruments cross borders that people and policy cannot.
A documentary portrait in the Alps that slowly became a meditation on art, solitude, and the thin boundary between observation and myth.
Playing a grand piano inside a deconsecrated church in Lucca, and what a room continues to hold after its original purpose has gone.
A few hours alone with a prepared piano in a studio in Bern, and the strange feeling that an instrument can become architecture.
A note on Pedro Reinel, Rio Formoso, and the strange feeling of finding Batu Pahat on a sixteenth-century Portuguese chart.
Photographs from the ancestral hall and a reflection on why ritual is often understood only after leaving home.
An indigo courtyard, a bonsai tree, and the lesson that old heritage mansions teach you how to look before they tell you who lived there.
Recording a grand piano inside the Cittadella di Aosta, and letting the stone decide how the piece would end.
Recording two friends singing Renaissance madrigals in a Romanesque church in Tuscany, and wondering whether a building can remember every voice that has ever risen into it.
Rediscovered photographs of an apartment where I painted almost every evening, and the realisation that the gold leaf and sacred figures were already there, long before the ancestral work began.
Performing original compositions at a festival in Civitavecchia, years before the band found its name, and the realisation that the identity had already been quietly forming all along.