We were put on to Shabda, an Italian trio of avant-droners previously in Thee Maladoror Kollective, by the princely Matt Fitton over at The Sludgelord. Matt’s got a real knack for sniffing out delectable morsels, but he outdid himself here. This, he rightly recognized, is more than drone. This ain’t your Sunn logo drawn on a mini-fridge type of hum n’ wum.
Tummo, the Shabda’s recently released second album, harnesses a different spirit, tapping into the consciousness of post-modern minimalists such as Terry Riley, La Monte Young, and Pandit Pran Nath. That said, there’s a current of energy arcing through Shabda’s guitar/bass, sitar, synths, and laptop oms which is plain ancient. It’s primal, evoking an era when decisions were binary, when it was “life” or “death.” Matt picked up on that. It’s why he impassionately implored review scrollers to stop and have a listen.
We did. We felt the vibration, aligned ourselves to it, and let it simultaneously nourish our soul and terrify our senses. Now, we’re asking you to do the same.
Stop.
Don’t just add this as another variable into today’s multitasking equation.
Stop.
Breathe in. Breathe out. Cut the strings to other thoughts.
Are you free?
Okay.
Hit play.
Then, don’t stop. Even when “Kamakhya”’s stunning, ultra-distorted guitar, tall and encompassing as an obelisk, shoots a bolt of feedback into your brain. Even when the subdued, shimmering sea is drawn out of the bay to form a massive wave. Even when grains of sand accumulate enough compatriots to become hungry dunes. Don’t stop. Find your place in the middle of the extremes, where all and nothing are absolute possibilities.
Of course, we had to know more. We got in touch with Shabda’s vocalist, percussionist, and laptop wrangler, Marco Castagnetto. We asked him five questions, he gave us five answers.
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I’d like to start from the beginning, if I could. How did Shabda come together? What drew you towards this type of project? And, once the pieces were set, how did it evolve?
All of us had already played together in Thee Maldoror Kollective, and we’ve been a kind of extended family, so it was natural to work together again on a completely new project. Anna is my partner, and we had no doubt about whom to turn towards for the guitar, because Riccardo is simply the best musician with whom we have played in all these years. I say this knowingly: to play together is a very intimate thing, and, having a difficult character, I seek a fine balance of human confidence, technical expertise, and competence to move between styles and languages. So we recorded an entire album that had to be thrown away after a few months. I consider it as the childhood of Shabda, the needed trial to focus an identity that then took a shaped awareness in The Electric Bodhisattva and Tummo albums.
Musically, Tummo cleverly utilizes repetition to subtly move these massive tone clusters forward, not unlike minimalists such as La Monte Young or Lubomyr Melnyk. How did you find these sounds and do you remember the eureka moment when you knew this was for you? Any particular composer/composition you’d cite as your favorite?
Minimalism is a genre that unites the musical tastes of all of us. I think its main strength (beyond how it influenced the musical landscape of the 1900s, an aspect that may be interesting from the historical point of view, but I’m completely indifferent to it when it comes to composing) is to show us there are complex worlds within a single note. Me and Anna are following a method of sound meditation to which we are applying some additions and corrections in recent years, and that is based on using dynamic frequencies in correspondence with the subtle energy centers of man, and the stylistic patterns of minimalism certainly lend themselves well to an exploration of this kind. After the experiences we had with TMK, we were needed to subtract, to reduce the sound, and to better focus on a few elements to allow the compositions to be not only aesthetic structures, but gears capable of interacting with the less coarse layers of human being. It was not a single moment, I’d rather think of a path, which is still obviously omnivorous. La Monte Young remains one of my favorite composers, but I would add Arvo Part, Charlemagne Palestine, the interesting work of Durighello between minimalism and monodic singing, Eliane Radigue, Moondog, the unreachable Berio, and Bruno Maderna. If you add an unexpected influence of Dead Can Dance you can have a fairly complete picture of us.
Through many replays, I hear an undeniable underlying structure. So, how composed are your songs? Is there a great deal of improvisation or certain chance operations at play when building these epics up? Is there a set game plan ala modal jazz or Indian ragas? Or, by the time you hit the studio, is everything in its right place?
You’ve hit the thing: the compositions of Shabda, despite their listening appears as a continuous stream of micro-variations and slow axis movements redefining the mood on long-term only, follow a strong compositive structure that’s shaped in their origin. The different moments in compositions leave openings for improvisation that are installed in a however written development, and I believe this is the least perceptible influence that we have received from Hindustani music, where, contrary to popular belief, there is no real improvisation but rather an immediate construction based on standard figures. The raga is a path capable of infinite variations (you cannot listen to the same Raga Multani twice, for example) but that moves on precise sound and shruti mathematics, a discipline that seeks to rebuild through the notes and spaces between these geometries with which thought takes shape. A very natural thing if you think of the Shaiva metaphysics, where the emanation of the manifest world is the process by which Shiva knows himself and, at the end of each Wheel of Time, turn back on himself.
One of the most striking aspects of Shabda is the spiritualism. Do you mind taking us through your themes and how you interpret those themes through the music? Plus, how do you get into the proper mindset before playing?
The point is not to be ready at a certain time, but to constantly keep the attention. It makes a lot of talk about meditation: once again, however, we have absorbed it as a westernized product, filtered through an unavoidable mercantile dynamic, but we missed the target again. The eastern yogic techniques are largely unusable, because they have been developed for a human type structurally very different from the current one. So then the same yoga has become nothing more than an even healthy mental and physical hygiene practice. But a spiritual path that stands down on our physical, psychological, or intellectual level, quite simply, is not a spiritual path. This involves the construction of the diamond body, and it’s not a therapy that can make us better withstand the common flow of events and perceptions that we call life, because this is more than enough for psychology. I’m actually close to Sufism and Vedanta, but implementing their dynamics in the Western Tradition context: it is easy to lose sight of it, but the manifestations of tradition have shaped on the structures of men, and these are different between East and West. I am a Westerner, and that’s enough for me. The alchemical path starts from assumptions that are common to all, but it differs operationally according to our own constructs, and trying to follow a path modeled on a construct other than our own means is to be a victim of a very common exotic fascination, and ultimately to take a road leading to nowhere. In short, we need a constant tension, the persistence on the observer role, a discipline that must accompany us in every moment of our day and that we must apply it to the rise of each of our thoughts, finding that strength that is far beyond the forms and shapes that our mind sets out on our thought.
Where would you like to take Shabda from here? If money/logistics weren’t a limiter, where would you go sonically and what would you try?
I am satisfied with the dimension of Shabda, and I haven’t the goal to forcefully bring the project to be something with a greater resonance. We have the freedom to compose and publish the stuff we feel better about, without artistic or conceptual constraints of any kind. So the other corollaries of music does not actually interest me so much. Sounds are means and not an end, and like everything else, there’s a moment in which they’re here and the next moment they’re gone. Music runs like any other event under the sun. Music is a discipline that can be extremely useful as a spiritual preparation for the reintegration of the individual, and so as a form of education to freedom; because of this education, we must live it without any attachment.
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Shabda’s Tummo is available now through Argonauta Records.
