Interviews

Lendormin (Cristiano Luciani - Marco Maurizi) interview by Daniela Cascella - published on Blow Up Magazine n.112

Sept. 2007

"Night Dawn Day" is a work that sketches visions, flashes devices and black shadows. Bears the signature of Lendormin, Roma duo comprising Cristiano Luciani (percussion, drums, objects, electronics) and Marco Maurizi (guitar) who have taken inspiration from the trilogy by George Romero’s Zombie trilogy to assemble and disassemble, quartered and galvanize three creatures sonore arising from contact with so many accomplices that wander in the underground scene: DBPIT, Larsen Lombriki, Luca Miti.In the Night sounds generated near the horn of DBPIT seem to say a De Profundis pay and estranging are consequently, cracks and damage that the idea of something that moves in the body of sound, not to develop it but for a lamb raccogliervisi inside the contours. In Dawn, with Larsen Lombriki, what initially seems pure joy to be free as the self-erosion of a sound that axle with violence abstract geometries ruthless, and repeats the thrill of getting lost in a swirling back on themselves. Next to the prepared piano Luca Miti Day is shaping up in a scenario Sibillini, a possible leak in which the sound is all stretched to its limit and gait towards asymptotic mentally stubborn. Overflowing of ideas, strong vision of a polished composition that manages to tame a matter we are insidious, "Night Dawn Day" seems to regenerate every listen.

The idea to include the interview in a section devoted to exchanges between sound and image has little to do with Romero itself as a series of visions, light or dark edges absolute: in "Night Dawn Day" create the sounds that I can better grasp if we think in terms of plastic and touch, not analyzing from a purely musical.

D.You write the work as a "movie for your ears." What is this world of light and views through music?

M. "Movie for your ears" is a quote from Frank Zappa, who had a visual way of conceiving music as a succession of streams, repetition, sudden changes, ascents and descents. Our idea was to create something with an internal consistency in terms of images that inspired, and that could be heard as a film for the ears, but not as a concept album in which the structure crushes the music and make it functional a pre-formed. We have tried to follow the wire inside of the musical discourse, let us be guided by it as far as possible: music has always had the last word.For the same reason was clear from the outset that the result should not be a sound alternative to Romero but something independently.

C. The structure of the work, which is an experiment in deconstruction rock'n'roll, dinghies and electroacoustic free jazz, has a strong visionary to find touch and the plasticity of sound. A musician told me: "Play as polyps tangled ... slippery and full of meat" is a wonderful find, out of the second static perception cliché that block the power of imagination in phrases like: "your work combines free jazz and noise, no wave and electro-acoustics "This is pretty boring. The tangled polyps are infinitely more interesting.

D.How does the Romero trilogy inspired "Night Dawn Day"?

C. The trilogy is an expressionist vision of reality. Each image violent, horrifying or grotesque is not an end in itself and is not an ironic exorcism of death: it is a fierce critique institutions. Cannibalism is a metaphor for the oppression of man during the highest degree of faith in the progress of industrialized society. We created the work under the impulse of such awareness.

M. There is something in the living dead that terrifies and seduces us. The relationship between the trilogy and our music is "parallel convergence": that we wanted the structure of the cd has nothing to do with the narrative structure of films and we have abandoned the vision, the atmosphere and the nightmares that individual episodes aroused in us. There is a kind of logic in epidermal three parts, which is expressed in pictures both in Romero that in our music: the isolation of rural Night, the bloody cacophony of goods of Dawn, the terrible devastation of subterranean Day. We left to drive insights like these and we asked the other musicians do the same: to drop any explicit reference to the film.

D. With regard to the three partnerships, have come to mind when he wrote André Breton in Nadja that instead of asking "Who am I?" would be worth asking "who infests?" Who infest the Lendormin? I also wonder why the partnerships are very well researched and the result of work developed.

C. Born as a duo improvisation but we have always wanted to experiment, learn, spread and become infected. It seems to me that all the circumstances in which music has promoted this fundamental aspect of human beings have produced high results: among the last, Derek Bailey and David Sylvian, Spring Heel Jack and Han Bennink, Evan Parker and Jason Pierce, Björk and Matmos . The collaborations are for us a true love.The registration of a disk is therefore an important moment, introspective and invests the spectrum of our emotions, music and life are intertwined, the contours will fade, born dialogues on world view, this requires energy, commitment and communication on different levels that goes far beyond the need to record a single meeting of music.

D. A question about the performance in opposition (is?) To recorded music and production of a disc. E 'listen to a valuable work of artists rooted in performance, which in the assembly of the disc have put dance compositional reasoning that stand apart from the mere recording of something spontaneous ...

M. We wanted a record that was not the documentation of a performance but a structured and readable on different floors. So we decided to intervene on compositive improvised material that, in the way in which it was thought, was an expression of a project.

Composed music and performances are not in opposition: both are attempts to build a sense of totality, the first sets, the second mobile. A certain tension between the two but there is, and we have experienced in the resistance that the material objected to the needs improvised compositions.

C. The works on which music is played with an inspired performance enhance the recording and production. Think about the most intense blues and soul records: sometimes see the musician, in the perception of sound is almost identify with expressing emotions. If you need to stop recording a stream of energy expressive urgency, the performance is key: the punk shows. In the first album of PIL, there are errors of execution that are not bothered listening to a hit is the violence of the performance.

We chose the direction of processing and assembly to combine spontaneity and brain. This track is from our background in music that combines a passion for blues, rock, punk and free jazz listening to electroacoustic, electronic and contemporary classical. Personally, I think I want to lose in the body of music ...

D.The work strikes me this sense of "slow time", we return to a plastic sound, there are times when we can enchant. Now that everyone seems to optimize the time or saturated, managed to delay, to limit waste time; take time and to give attention.

M. The issue revolves around which the music is the relationship between chronological time and musical time. As Adorno said, when the latter abandons the first, when a song is limited to "decorate the empty time", the music has failed, because the music is an experience from another time. So I find your observation interesting. At first glance it may seem paradoxical because the work we have done was to check the intensity rather than the dilation and, therefore, reduce the expression to basics and to avoid "wasting time".In reality, this has been the emergence of the musical time and leave behind - excuse the pun - every time dead!

Night with DBPIT, for example, was the part where we have dedicated more to the work of a composition table. We asked to give us DBPIT bases - he is a genius at creating carpets oneiric and enveloping sound with trumpet and electroacoustic effects - on which we have spoken with razors and blades sharpened, improvising as above to create expressive glimpses on canvas ... You can say that the composition of this part was a long and wild improvisation in slow motion.

D.In part by the Larsen Lombriki feel on one hand the feeling of a sound that eats itself, the other which makes obsessive moments of emptiness even more violent.

M. It may seem the most impenetrable but if you listen well is an episode rock! There is a drop-physical energy of rock, the pleasure of playing. We were inspired by Dawn Of The Dead as a punk film, front, pressing, amused but also excruciating, devastating, terrible: we used the vehemence to explode in a more corrosive silence. The immediacy is continually denied: it is part of the disk where we worked more on changes of pace, atmosphere, the full and empty. The work in post-production is dreamlike, with an almost conceptual use of reverb etc..You have received two of the images that have guided us: the phantasmagoria of goods becomes obsession and death. Music obsession of the living (goods that are the result of "mortification" of human labor) and the dead (zombies return to the supermarket to eat the living). In both cases it is the man who eats himself.

A decidedly funny if it were not painfully similar to the world around us. Here is the figure-of Romero that we tried to play: the impossible synthesis of irony and horror.

D. The part with Luca Miti has the light of day Mediterranean but is a light venata of concern. Here you feel the gesture of producing sounds, and every gesture that creates every sound appears necessary and weighed.

C. The light of that talk is disturbing because there is a brutal clash between melody and noise. The Miti’s s pianism, sometimes free-jazz, is devoured by the sound: there is a continuing tension between the pleasure of listening to the tone and the materiality of the noise produced by contact microphones on drums, plastic, tapes and articles on guitar. When Luca plays the piano and we prepared items or electronic instruments to music becomes more abstract, the ghostly atmosphere, the day is spent in his absence.The recording of this part is very rough, we left the room's natural reverb of incision to make the environment different from other parts of the disk, which has reinforced the feeling that in the latter part of the disc sounds were underground.

In fact, the gestural marks of producing sounds.

The sounds are the result of the gesture that manipulates the body of the instruments, objects and tools. We have deliberately left this part of the disc bare, with very few overdubs and the attention to listening happens in the relationship of the gesture with the choice of instruments and the subsequent construction of the sound.