COLONY - MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

 MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

IIIHIII 04/2013

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Unlike in the past, this time I will provide a little information. I started working on MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, the fourth album of COLONY, more or less in 2007. The first five tracks were promptly thrown in the refrigerator and left there for almost three years. For good. At that time I was starting to deal with the ALS syndrome that struck my father: accepting the thought of an incurable lifelong degenerating illness that would have trasformed the body into a dumb rubber puppet while the mind would have been awake during the whole process was frightening and unbearable. And I felt ashamed of my feelings because that illness wasn't even happening to me. Since I absolutely could not imagine what it was really like, this inner distance only boosted my sense of guilt.

I used to watch the little bedroom in which the increasingly detached body of my father was living 24 hours a day, thinking about the moment in which that room would have been empty, meaning that the suffering would finally be over.

My father is still alive and the illness is still going.

That was the starting point. First I tried to avoid and escape that hopeless situation and then I tried to confront it. In the meantime, in the silence of the aforementioned refrigerator, MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS had changed, had evolved and was ready to became a thing of its own. In its first version the album should have included only six tracks. Then those tracks became ten, then eighteen and then nothing. Deeply unsure of its future release, I stopped working on it for another year and in the meantime I recorded my half of CITIES APART. And that's why you could notice some sonic correspondences between the two works.

Then suddenly, in no special day or particular situation, MUSIC FROM EMPTY ROOMS came back from the dead and during the following months rushed to its end. That's it. Things have fallen into their places and the scheme has displayed itself in front of me naturally, like a book or a flower. Well, sort of.

Now I'm satisfied with the final result, that is the version you can enjoy and download for free, as usual.

Two more things:

One: Memory is a deep well in which sometimes we end up seeing only the wrong things. Two: I'm not so good at playing piano.

For those of you who might need further explanation about the lenght of each track and therefore might argue if something went wrong during the creative process of the album, I can only say that the total timing of 2 hours and 10 minutes is absolutely purposeful.

Although the album isn't perfect, perfection wasn't the idea. To me making music has NOTHING to do with being perfect, beautiful, cool, acceptable, new or groundbreaking. If any of these things happen, it would be merely incidental. To me making music has EVERYTHING to do with expression, communication, trasfiguration, healing and reconciliation. To me making music is trying to do always my best, no matter the elements involved. No matter what the result will be or if people will like it or not.

My deepest gratitude go to 'John' Mario Vallenari of CABEZON RECORDS for lending me the song "Well Of Memory", to Maria Messina for evoking the ghosts in "You Never Came Back Home" and to Davide Saggioro of Wise mastering Studio for holding all the sound structure together.

Now it's finally time to let MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS to go where it has to and try to move on again. And where do I go from here? That's a good question I'll try to answer with the second part of what could be a trilogy of sorts, that is the new album TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING, out in 2014.

"...what did Time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room, or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing" (Ray Bradbury - Night Meeting, 1950).

Thank you for staying up late for this.

Always be elusive. 

S.

Music For Empty Rooms by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.