Villa Borghese, Winter
An afternoon in Villa Borghese with Michele Malea, his Rolleiflex, and the sape. A threshold into the notebook where music is something observed, carried, photographed, and remembered.
Syurga Selvaggio
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.
Cliffside Goodbye
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.
The Sape I Brought Home
Watching Mathew Ngau Jau carve an instrument from a single piece of timber, and understanding that I was not simply acquiring a sape but entering into a relationship with its maker, its place, and its tradition.
The First Sound of the Sape
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.
Fortressa: rehearsing an album into existence
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.
The sound of rooms
Visiting the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna with a Zoom recorder, gathering sound for a museum video score, and discovering that a building performs continuously whether or not anyone is listening.
Shusurrus at Villa Wolkonsky
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.
After the Altar
Playing a grand piano inside a deconsecrated church in Lucca, and what a room continues to hold after its original purpose has gone.
The Piano with Its Bones Exposed
A few hours alone with a prepared piano in a studio in Bern, and the strange feeling that an instrument can become architecture.
Lumière Inversions
Recording a grand piano inside the Cittadella di Aosta, and letting the stone decide how the piece would end.
Voices in Gropina
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.
The Music Before the Name
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.
The Nights That Taught Me to Listen
The earliest chapter: 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. Where the listening began.