E-dition magazine - interview given in April 2004

Interview by Artemi Pugachov 1. Did you have any musical experience before BIOnighT was formed? FaBIO: No, personally I never had any particularly meaningful experience. Mac: Well, when I was five or six I used to spend the afternoons in my bedroom experimenting with an old reel-to-reel tape recorder trying to get weird sounds out of it by changing the speed of the tape and stuff like that, as sounds have always deeply fascinated me. Later on, when I started organizing noise into something that could almost be called music, I played with odd "instruments" that I built out of any object I could find; for example, one of them was made with the pick up of an old turntable connected to a tennis racket string - a very weird sounding kind of electric guitar with no body - while another was made out of coffee cans with inflatable balloons stretched on top of them, and then there was a pretty strange drum machine that I got by short circuiting an old home stereo amplifier; this gadget sounded like something Kraftwerk would have been enthused about, but needless to say it wasn't very long before the whole thing blew up! Anyway, I've been making music since I was 16, but before the BIOnighT project my only "releases" were a few tapes for my friends. Besides, I had never played with anybody, as music is for me very private and personal. FaBIO is the only person I've ever shared that very intimate part of myself with, and probably the only one I would ever share it with. So I guess we could say I never had any serious musical experience before BIOnighT was formed. 2. How would you describe the process of working together? Do you usually create in perfect harmony between each other, or is it sometimes like a musical dispute or even a fight? BIOnighT: Apart from the "Afterpost" period - during which everything turned into some kind of fight - you could describe our creative process as "harmony," but the most important part of it all is probably trust and faith in each other. You see, when you begin to write a piece and it is still there unformed and almost shapeless, your brain and soul suggest a certain direction that you feel the song should take, but that is sometimes very different from the way another musician would develop the same idea. When that happens to us, we very often do what basically comes down to a regular leap of faith: one of us decides that maybe the other one has a clearer vision of the potentialities of the track, and let him lead the way in spite of all his perplexities. Other times it becomes evident that one of us is emotionally involved in a song much more than the other is, so the other one gives up his own vision; after all we can always make a remix of the track to make both of us happy! 3. What are your primary musical influences? FaBIO: In the beginning I only listened to classic music, medieval ballads, Celtic music, and Italian singers and songwriters; then one day at a friend's I "met" electronic music - Phaedra by Tangerine Dream, to be precise. I understood that the emotions generated by that kind of music were unique, and they've been growing on me more and more. Mac: Every kind of music, really; as BIOnighT we are obviously influenced by the Berlin School, but personally I blend bits of everything into what I do and I try hard to listen to all kinds of music carefully, as I always find interesting things and ideas to learn from in all genres. 4. What instruments do you usually play and which instruments were used in "Egoheart", "Afterpost" and "Daybreak", in particular? BIOnighT: Believe it or not, we only used a GEM S3 turbo workstation and some sounds from a Soundblaster Live. We think that there are a lot of musicians out there that have the most awesome instruments, but they use only 15% of what their machines can really generate in terms of musical power. An instrument is a tool you can express yourself through, and the more you know it, the better results you can achieve. Think of what a musician can get out of a violin, for example: it's just a piece of wood, still there's an amazing range of things you can do with it if you really master it! So it's kinda depressing that most people only get to know their electronic instruments enough to get the most basic and obvious functions out of them... 5. What do you think about people believing Electronic Music to be fully automated? FaBIO: I think people are superficially right, but only when you try to create music with machines you can understand that that is not the case, because if you have nothing to express whatever instrument you use is useless. Mac: Unfortunately, I think that's unavoidable. Today there are so many gadgets that do some wonderful things entirely by themselves that people think anything that's electronic works in the same way. It's a matter of ignorance, lack of information, or even misinformation on part of journalists, TV, and magazines. When in 1978 the first Japanese cartoon landed on the Italian TV screens, the idiots who worked for the Italian press wrote lots of articles saying that series was made by a computer. Mind: they didn't write it was made WITH a computer, but BY a computer! They wrote that somebody in Japan just tossed some information about the story, the characters, and the colors into this mysterious machine, and this amazing computer produced the whole episode completely by itself... and everybody believed it!! Actually, no computer whatsoever was used by the Japanese studios back then (it was 1978, for crying out loud!) and those series were created in the traditional way, that is, drawn and colored entirely by hand. Almost 30 years have passed and you would expect people to have reached a different level of information, but actually it's even worse than it was before, because now people think they know it all and refuse to even listen to you when you say that electronic music is NOT that thing that kids do with samples and some toy software or something that machines do by themselves. It's sad, but now that information is available to everybody, there's more ignorance than ever before, and that is not only true about electronic music... 6. How do you see the relation of Electronic Music and science fiction or space exploration? FaBIO: Both are infinite. Mac: Well, there's a very strong connection, but it's hard to pinpoint the real reason behind this. Maybe it's because space is still a mysterious place, something we're part of but that we will never really see nevertheless, and so the unearthly sounds that electronic instruments can create are the sounds that better than any other can describe the unknown territories beyond our atmosphere. They are strange and impossible to identify with a terrestrial object - for example, a flute is made of wood, which comes from a tree, which is in turn a very terrestrial and understandable thing, but listen to a Moog: no terrestrial object can be directly connected to it, while it's relatively easy to imagine a galaxy or a distant planet while listening to it. These are things that exist, but because of the limits of human beings they basically only live in our imagination, with no direct connection with the world we can see around us, just like the sounds of electronic instruments. 7. Please, speak about "Songswell", the album that differs from other BIOnighT works stylistically. How did it come about? BIOnighT: Even if the Berlin School is the main source of inspiration for our music, we like other genres, too. So in the four years we have been playing together it was inevitable for us to write some songs belonging to other kinds of music. In 2002 we had put aside enough material, so we gave those tracks a definitive shape and compiled them into a complete album. Three of the tracks that appear in Songswell were actually included in the first edition of Afterpost, but later on we understood that album would have sounded much better without the contrast those tracks created with the "krautrock" pieces Afterpost was mainly made of, so we decided to move them to Songswell, and turn Afterpost in a purely "cosmic" album. I think we will do the same thing in the future, as in the past few months we have already written a few songs that could be defined more or less celtic or medieval, so there will probably be another album like Songswell in a few years. 8. Have you released any solo albums? Mac: Yes, we have released two retrospective solo albums from before BIOnighT existed: Naif Music by FaBIO and Human Electricity by me, both very electronic. Then there are two solo albums by me featuring songs of all genres, from jazz to dance, from medieval to fusion, from techno to melodic, from electronic to experimental, and more; they also include some tracks by BIOnighT that were discarded because FaBIO did not like them, while I did love them and didn't want them to be left unheard. The titles of the two albums are Aphasia (2001), and Dining Room (2002). Finally, FaBIO is now working on a new solo album, very hypnotic and fascinating, excellent material indeed! (Please visit www.macvibes.com for the updated catalog of Mac's albums 9. Any plans for the future? FaBIO: To keep on spending time together in harmony, and hopefully generate more musical emotions. Mac: We are going to change our instruments, in order to find new stimuli and get more flexibility, and of course we will keep trying to make as many people as possible get acquainted with our works. No big plans to speak of, really, partly because we have to maintain a balance between our private lives and BIOnighT, and any bigger plans would inevitably alter that balance. 10. And finally: if you were allowed to do concerts in five cities of the world, which ones would you go for? Mac: Dunno, I'm not very fond of playing live, don't think that our kind of music meets the requirements of a live concert. I mean, some of our songs are made of over 30 tracks, it goes without saying that we could never play live all of them - there are only two of us! - and what sense does it make to play live only a couple of tracks on a recorded base? Besides, FaBIO has a wife and children, I have a pretty complex life myself, and therefore travelling to give concerts would be too complicated to be worth it. So I never really thought about it, but if I had to make a list of the places I'd love to visit I'd certainly say Tokyo and other Japanese cities and towns; I'm a fan of anime - Japanese cartoons, that is - and I've always only seen that country thru those series, so I'd love to visit it using concerts as an excuse! FaBIO: Well, since dreaming is free... The Duomo in Milan (Italy), Reims Cathedral in France, the Coliseum in Rome (Italy), Machu Picchu, Giza in Egypt. To visit E-dition website click HERE