Tuesday, May 13, 2008

Two and a Half Questions with Emanuele Errante

What defines modern classical sound for you?
The modern classical sound is the result of a constant research of new canons in the creative process, associated to a deep innermost research. The new resulting approach can include the whole music background of the last years, but the standards are radically distorted and released from the cages of the strict scores of the traditional classical music. I don't like to close music in small labeled boxes ordered by genres, categories and sub-categories though. I prefer considering the arts for what they express, no matter the genre, the style, or the standards they belong to.

Are there any Italian artists that we should check out?
My reference point is an artist from my city, Naples: Luciano Cilio. He was only 33 when he committed suicide in 1983. His music was a step ahead of any other known artist. If you listen to his tracks you realize how his music is still incredibly projected to the future. Maybe he was too "modern", too advanced, too much ahead to be understood and those might be some of the reasons of his sad story. His music survived though, and I strongly recommend to hear "Dell'universo assente", a collection of his masterpieces released by the label Die Schachtel in 2004, whose contents in the 20-pages booklet have been written by Jim O'Rourke. I'll never stop thanking Lino Monaco of the great electronic duo Retina.it (Hefty) for letting me know Cilio's music several years ago. Also, I'm obliged to mention two Italian artists who do not need any introduction:Ludovico Einaudi and Alessandra Celletti. As per ambient music, I like Enrico Coniglio (especially in duo with Elisa Marzorati) Giuseppe Ielasi and Lorenzo Senni.

Tell us about NetstockFest.
NetstockFest was the very first 4 days 24hours-nonstop music festival that happened completely online. I wanted to create a special event for the whole netaudio community and I thought it had to happen on the Internet, which is the natural environment for all commercial and non-commercial artists who come from netaudio. So I talked about the idea of an online festival to my friend Raffaele Marranzini and we immediately started studying the way to make it possible. Pete Leuenberger (head of the netlabel maetrixsolution and creator of the Everest-released project Mathon) and Manfred Genther (creator of the Lab30 festival in Germany) helped in the organization. The technology behind Netstock (whose name means "Woodstock on the Net") allowed any artist to perform live for 60 minutes from his bedroom, his studio, or from any other place with an Internet connection available. The performance was broadcasted to a central server and then replicated in real time by all the webradios involved thus letting multiple users from all over the world listen to the festival without any problem of buffering and bandwidth. All listeners could also chat in a specific chatroom created on Soulseek and share comments and opinions in real time about the performances they were listening to. In the days before the festival we had to test the connection for every artist who participated and we tested it again on a private broadcasting one hour before each artist went "on-air". It's been a very long weekend, where we almost did not sleep at all but it was great fun for everybody. Maybe for the first time artists had the opportunity to play a concert from their own places and reach a global audience in real time! Artists were very nervous before performing as if they had to go up on a real stage. Some of them broadcasted from parks or other open-air places where they went with their friends and then posted pictures taken during their performances. We had a mean of 3000 listeners for every performance which is a great result considering that we did very little promotion. We felt like pioneers. No other event with the same features of Netstock has happened since then, as far as I know. In the lineup there were names like Kilowatts, Dennis DeSantis, Bern, Molair, Alex Navarro, Retina.it, Tomas Jirku and Rob Warren, Krill.Minima, among the others. I hope we will have a chance to repeat this great experience one of these days.

maisound.com/errante | myspace.com/eerrante

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