down and wrote my first track in my 30s. Q: Just like that? A: It was a bit of an accident. My girlfriend at the time, who is now my wife, got me a copy of Ludovico Einaudi’s scores in 2006. She knew I liked him and had sensed my frustration at not being able to play Herbie Hancock. I spent many a nights transcribing Herbie Hancock’s and Keith Jarrett’s solos without being able to play them! That is when my wife suggested I gave Einaudi a go. I started studying his work and a whole new world opened up to me. I sensed a certain familiarity with his writing style. Shortly after I wrote my first piece. As a matter of fact, my first album Viaggi in Aeromobile is heavily indebted to Einaudi. It is something I acknowledge and it is an album I am very happy with. I was discovering my writing style at the time and in fact the tracks were all quite long, four-five minutes, something that I wouldn’t do anymore. With Viandanze I took a different path finding my own way, but to begin with I did immerse myself in the sound of Einaudi. Q: What was it that you liked the most about Einaudi’s music? A: I liked his sense of balance. Especially up until his Divenire album of 2006, his piano playing feels to me like watching a Kandinski painting, there is nothing that is out of place. Everything is perfectly balanced. And he has a particular and specific touch, this is his great strength, if I may say so. The tracks are just perfect. This is something that is peculiar to him and which I cannot find in other musicians. Max Richter on the other hand is great in the way he mixes piano and electronics, but the balance that Einaudi has is specific to him and to him alone. With In a Time Lapse he has shifted his style, but if one listens to his double album live at La Scala, that is quintessential Einaudi. Q: Are you also suggesting that you like things to be polished and don’t allow for any roughness in your music? A: I am very open, and as I said when I
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Photography: Fabrizio Paterlini by Matteo Bricchi // Mantua by Gianmarco Del Re
was younger I used to sing Pantera! Achieving a sense of balance in a track is very reassuring both for the listener and the musician. The feeling of already knowing how a particular track will unfold is reassuring and when one listens to Einaudi or O’Halloran for instance, there is something reassuring in their style. That is not to say that the tension one can hear in a Nils Frahm track isn’t welcome. I love both approaches. What I like the most at present is a certain melancholic tone, which I feel very close to. I once read an interview with Arnalds where he said he tries to make a living by writing melancholic music! At the end of the day one cannot choose what one writes.
Q: Without resorting to psychogeography, here, but would you say your melancholic streak comes from the particular atmosphere of Mantua, which is often immersed in thick fog? A: (Laughs.) I don’t know. Q: I was asking because just by talking to you, you don’t really come across as a melancholic person. A: No. I am quite jolly in character but when one writes music, one cannot choose the tone. Whatever comes natural comes natural. Once I was talking to someone who suggested a did a Summer Stories album after my Autumn Stories to see what could come out by writing in 40 degrees, with blinding light. As a matter of fact I don’t tend to work a lot in the summer. There are different reasons for this. Mostly, in Summer I tend to spend more time outdoors and I do tend to write music more easily from autumn to spring. I don’t know… It is true that I have always like the fog, with its different degrees. People do ask me to write jolly tracks, but there is nothing I can do about it. I cannot choose what I write. Or at least not just yet. Q: What does your wife say about it? A: (laughs) She is fundamental part of my music. She is the one who gave me the initial kick and the first one to listen to a finished product. She plays my music when I am not there and would either say:
“That’s good”, or “Hmmm…”. She is always the first one to listen to what I do. Q: Does she see your melancholic side? A: She calls me “the depressed” (laughs). So, yes, I would say that she does see it. Q: Let us talk about Autumn Stories. It was written one track a week. More often than not, with this type of project, things start to unravel halfway through. How did you manage to keep it going? A: I had to be very focused and it really happened the way I set out to do it. I posted each new track online on a Wednesday. I wrote the tracks on Thursdays and Fridays, then mixed them and mastered them over the weekend. Also, I wrote the album entirely at night. My child was still small; he was two years old at the time in 2011. He took up a lot of my time during the day and at night I worked on that album, one week from the next. I don’t know if I would be capable of doing it nowadays, but at the time I was really motivated. Q: Did you ever ask yourself, “Why am I doing this?” A: No, I found the response I was getting online very comforting. The tracks were freely available and they gave me a lot of exposure. It was a very positive experience. After a while it become normal to write a track a week. Q: Was your wife counting the days? A: No, she was generally asleep. While the whole house was asleep, I put my headphones on and I wrote a track a week for 14 weeks. After a while I could feel the adrenaline. I also realized that the more one writes and the more one feels the need to write. At the end of the