COLONY - NODES

NODES

IIIHIII 07/2016

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here.

The recording sessions for what has gradually become in the last five years my "Trilogy of Absence" (MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING, MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING) spawned several tracks that didn't make the final cut of each one of the aforementioned albums, mainly for a question of overall length. To put simply, there was already a lot of things to listen to that I worried that adding another track would have definitely spoiled the broth. So I did my choices.

Obviously - according to the famous, unwritten universal law that we all know - things often tend to start in a way and end in another and what should have been a simple compilation of out-takes became with the passing of months a completely different object: during the remixing phase new ideas started to merge into old ones (and viceversa), new sounds leading to new tracks slowly emerged from somewhere in the back of my mind, new connections were established, new meanings appeared and NODES, the seventh album of COLONY, became a thing of its own, with its underlying theme and its precise direction. At least, the direction was - and still is - precise for me.

NODES is the end of a cycle started in 2010. A lot of things has happened since then. Some of them were bad and unfortunately they had a lasting influence, but that's how life goes.

On a more optimistic note, the new album of COLONY - which is already in the works - will be called YOU LEFT ME DEALING WITH YOUR GHOSTS and will head in a slightly different direction, bringing back sclerotic beats, brooding urban soundscapes, rumbling basslines and some soaring vocals too. Sounds promising, doesn't it?

If I should write myself down, I would be one of those murky characters obsessed by the faults they've done in the past and paralyzed by the fact that they cannot do nothing for redeeming themselves now. "Too little, too late", they said in certain kind of movies. Or in smart books. And indeed it is. Nevertheless, I got to find a way out. As a consequence of this ceaseless head-scratching process, more music will be produced. Stay tuned.

"It feels like a moment I've lived a thousand times before, as if everything is familiar, right up to the moment of my death, that it will happen again an infinite number of times, that we will meet, marry, have our children, succeed in the ways we have, fail in the ways we have, all exactly the same, always unable to change a thing. I am again at the bottom of an unstoppable wheel, and when I feel my eyes close for death, as they have and will a thousand times, I awake" (Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything Is Illuminated, 2002).

Always be elusive.

S.

Nodes by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING

 

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING

IIIHIII 06/2015 - SE062

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here.

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING - the new album of COLONY - is the last chapter of a trilogy about absence and memory, the first two chapters being the previous MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS in 2013 and TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING at the beginning of this year. I know that I'm callously ruminating on boring themes that were already old some hundred years ago and that I can't add something really new or particularly important to this famous and painful topic, but I don't care. For those of you still willing to follow the sonic meditations of Colony - and you have my endless gratitude and appreciation for this - here's a sixtyfour-minute soundtrack for an imaginary road movie.

I like movies very much. I like roads too. The less travelled they are, the better.

Sure, these roads are sometimes hard to find on the map - if there is one - and they may also hide long shadows and serious perils. You may lose yourself and come back home late at night. Or never come back at all. But there's also the chance to find an entirely, unexpected new direction. And a new landscape too. Or maybe a door that opens on the same old house from where you left the day before. You think you're home and safe again and then you discover that someone else is now living in your place. Wearing your dresses. Eating your dinner. Sleeping in your bed. And that person is you. Pretty frightening.

Another scene.
Imagine the postman delivers you a letter.
The envelope is closed and there's a writing on it. It says:
"Do not open until the last day".

It all could also be an allegory for the old "forgive and forget" story, but since I don't want to give away too many hints about MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING, let's say that it's a comfort to think there is always the possibility to find a way out.
Because there is always a possibility, isn't there?

As you will notice, the album contains some ambient tracks taken from the 2007 debut THIS MACHINE NEVER SLEEPS and the following MEET, MERGE, DISSOLVE. I know someone might say that this is a rather strange choice and suggest that perhaps ideas are running out in the lab, but I assure you that this is not the case: these tracks from the past of COLONY are here again for a precise reason and they are purposefully mixed together with the other present-day, all-new compositions created bearing in mind the aforementioned soundtrack.

Maybe there's something small and precious at the end of the road and then it will be really worth it to have traveled so long. Who knows.
But I think it's time to go. To move on.

The next step will be the already announced collection called NODES, which has been postponed when this new album suddenly came out from nowhere and immediately claimed to be finished as soon as possible. 

MILES AND MILES OF NOTHING has been released on the renowned italian electronic netlabel STATO ELETTRICO. You can download the album in MP3 format directly from the label's large catalogue here. Many, many thanks to everyone involved.

Some things never change. They have only ceased to exist as objects and since then they lived solely as non-datable circumstances, well far out from that sequence of elements we call time. 

"When your dreams are of some world that never was or of some world that never will be and you are happy again, then you will have given up" (Cormac McCarthy - The Road, 2006).

Always be elusive.

S.

Miles And Miles Of Nothing by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING

TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING

IIIHIII 05/2015

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here.

After a ten-year long degenerative illness, my father passed away the same morning I went to the studio to begin mastering these tracks. I cannot help but see some beauty in such punctuality. TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING is the fifth album of COLONY and is dedicated to him.

Some textures and soundscapes were created during the previous sessions of MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS, but I decided not to include them in that album for fear of its playlist becoming really too long. So they ended up here pretty naturally, some of them with only little postproduction added and some drastically mixed with a lot of live improvisation, tape manipulation and other things. As a consequence of this free process - and as a precise choice too, obviously - in TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING there are no riffs, no hooks, no beats or other discernible rhythmic structures. Well, almost.

Tracks 1, 12 and 13 were recorded in the controlled environment of my lab and represent the link between this last album and MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS. As I wrote a year ago, they are indeed the first two chapters of a planned trilogy about absence and memory.

Many thank-you's go to my trustworthy sound engineer and long time friend Davide Saggioro of Wise Mastering Studio, who skillfully brought these tracks to life and to artist Michele Morando for allowing me to use his painting called "Chambre Sur La Mer": I believe it is the perfect representation of the sound of TIME DESTROYS EVERYTHING. You can find more information about him and his atelier here.

And finally my deepest gratitude goes to all of YOU, dear listeners and followers in my country and around the world. I'm happy and proud to say that you are many.

I don't know if time can really destroy everything, but a part of me doesn't hope so for sure. The other part simply just doesn't care.

However, in a constant struggle with entropy, it's already time to step ahead and move on. The next album is called NODES and it is a collection of ambient tracks which - over the last eight years - I dropped out at the last minute essentially for a matter of sonic homogeneity with the albums in which they should have been included. And then again - hopefully in 2016 - I'll be back to my roots with some serious kick drums, bass lines and more strictly-electronic stuff like that. Since things tend to be more short-term than we might think, it is important to have a lot of things to do in life.

"Got into something dangerous and strange. I was into nothing and that's the way I behaved. And I like those deep dark thoughts that leave you stranded way in mid-air. And I'd like to do something that makes somebody somewhere care. Playing with fire, why should I mind? I'm going beyond now and what will I find? Corridors filled with smoke and all the trees uprooted and dead. I was torn apart by my love for a different land" (Lawrence - Hours Of Darkness Have Changed My Mind, 1986).

Always be elusive. 

S.

Time Destroys Everything by Colony is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

COLONY - MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

 MUSIC FOR EMPTY ROOMS

IIIHIII 04/2013

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Licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND 3.0.
You can find more informations about this license here.

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.