When you claim your music is able to take listener’s through a personal, yet universal experience that’s inspired Inspired by the vital principles that move the cosmos and all sentimental beings, then you can bet that we’ll want to find out how it came about. We got chatting to Louis Siciliano, founder of the MUMEX trio (whose new record ‘Folds Of Time’ is drawing near) and the mind behind such otherworldly concepts to find out how it all came about…
SS: How would you describe your songwriting process?
I come from the classical composition. I worked a lot as a conductor and as an orchestrator and in the evenings I played Jazz in clubs, even if from the beginning of the nineties I started dealing with artificial intelligence applied to musical structures, I explored a lot the timbre expressiveness of Synths and I have been involved in musical research and ethnomusicology for a long time.
I tried to put all these experiences in an idea blender and from this background after 25 years of work my book MUSIC MULTIVERSE EXPLORATION: A NEW COSMOLOGY OF SOUND was born. All my music is born from this meta-language. I try to tell you briefly by extracting some important key concepts from this book:
I have been able to identify a fundamental concept in music: Symmetry. From the symmetry of intervalic structures, I then landed at MUSIC MULTIVERSE EXPLORATION. Through this meta-language, every architect-composer-performer will be able to freely build his own neighborhood, so to say, or an entire city, why not? Stravinsky said: “freedom for me is to be aware of the borders”. The peculiarity of MUMEX (MUSIC MULTIVERSE EXPLORATION) is that it will ensure that each neighborhood (structural element) is in harmony and in complete coherence with the other districts.
MUMEx therefore, is a management model that serves to “freely organize” the melodic flow, counterpoint lines, sound agglomerates, rhythmic figures and the tonal microstructures created by the composers-performers. MUMEx gives life to what I call real-time composition. It is a kind of “probabilistic music,” where the executive paths change every time. In reality, there are millions of possible routes, but only one will be the right one: the choice made “here and now.”
SS: How has this process evolved over time?
I had to work a lot on awareness. It all stems from a question that I asked myself, following the teaching of John Coltrane: is there a cosmic force that regulates the dynamics of sounds? As I tried to go deeper the music emerged. Do you think that it took me 47 years to get to mature a project like FOLDS OF TIME. I wanted to give a tangible form, to make these intuitions become “palpable sound” and it was very important to have had the maximum support and a total sharing with Bob Bellatalla (contrabass) and Mauro Salvatore (drums).
SS: Do you take songwriting inspiration from anyone in particular?
Once I did a concert alone in a big sports hall. I played about fifty instruments for two hours without stopping in front of a very large audience. A titanic undertaking, not to mention a real madness that I would never do again. I remember that I was touring Europe, the concert to say was at 9:00 pm I already started assembling musical instruments from 3:00 pm. What is not done for Mother Music? Well, after the concert, the great composer and opera player Aldo Brizzi, who worked a lot with Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil and his wife Graça Reis, an extraordinary singer, came to greet me in the dressing rooms. They came backstage and Aldo told me: “I would like to congratulate these thirty people/entities who live in you. You took us to India, then to West Africa, then we were in the States, then in Northern Europe even on the moon”. And we all burst out laughing.
Returning to your question: I am so grateful to all the musicians I met, listened to, with whom I shared my time and with all those who over the millennia, in every corner of the planet, have held the torch of music on, despite the devastating action of the banality of Consumerism: street musicians, Gypsy people, the many griots I met in Africa, the fantastic Pigmy People (they are in the center of my heart) as well as the great composers of European classical music and the great masters of Jazz. All of them inhabit my depths.
SS: What is the hardest thing about songwriting to you?
Music is life and composition is connection. Connection to human beings, connections to Mother Nature, to our pure and wonderful little brothers who are animals, connection to the cosmos. To connect, you need to make the void of thoughts. The empty infinity. It is really the hardest thing to do in a world where we are all always pressured by the many daily commitments. In these cases the key is to focus on the breath. The breath and the here and now, fully living every moment in the present, are fundamental for me.
SS: Do you have any remedies for a creative writing block?
We must always connect to the source of beauty: a flower in the garden, your child’s eyes, the sea, we are surrounded by a beautiful living symphony that we often don’t see. I personally love doing dynamic meditation. Over the years I have been interested in various meditation schools and techniques.
I traveled the world and lived a lot in India where I studied Sarangi with Pandit Kanhaiyalal Mishra and Shehnai with Ustad Ali Abbas Khan, nephew of the incredible Ustad Bismillah Khan. From all these experiences, I have summarized my way to meditation that I practice dynamically and actively during my days and reaches its peak when I make music. This combined with a correct vegetarian diet, with a propensity for balance makes my every day an opportunity to express my creativity at various levels. Then it must be said that creativity without willpower is like the day without the night, or the sky without the stars.
SS: How do you write music that people don’t just enjoy, but resonate with?
I would love to do it, I give it my all, I hope to succeed in this magical purpose. What I can say is that everything I do and who I am is always in a perspective of truth and openness. For years, I had to produce a lot of film music to make a living. I tried to please the directors, editors and film producers. FOLDS OF TIME is the first stop on a new journey and everything I’ve done before is just a prologue for me. Today it counts a lot for me to be totally devoted to the truth that each of us carries within if we dig well. A music that comes from the truth crosses all walls, even the high ones of the empty consumerism that characterizes our time.
For me today in my music everything coincides perfectly: life, spiritual practice and art. With so much humility I hope to be able to bring this fantastic energy to people. After all, they are only an intermediary. Music is not mine. It comes from very distant and unknown worlds. I am just an antenna that spreads it. If you are in resonance with this beauty that moves the cosmos, then you are in resonance with yourself and with the world. We are all ONE.
SS: How does your work with MUMEX TRIO differ from your solo work?
Listening is always the basis of everything. In the trio, interplay is fundamental and in the MUMEx Trio there is no leading instrument. Each of us is a voice, a planet if not a universe of sensitivity, of touch, of knowledge, of intuition that is intertwined with others. The exchange, the dialogue with Roberto Bellatalla and Mauro Salvatore is constant. And we all cover for one purpose: to bring sounds to life from a MUMEx perspective.
SS: Do you have any interesting/funny stories about the recording/writing process of Folds Of Time?
We decided to make the high resolution video album to document our performance without technological artifice. A way of making people feel close to us. Well, yesterday Bob Bellatalla from Andalucia called me and said: “But you could have told me that we had to record a video-album, I would have dressed up, I would have gone to the barber”. (We recorded the video album by surprise, without any preparation typical of the audiovisual industry). And I replied: “but we had to be spontaneous and natural. And then…you are like that, how to say…very Beatnik”. We died of laughter. Too funny.
Connect With Louis Siciliano below: