Giovanni Lami seems to have been overtaken by fits of giddiness and exuberance on his latest album, Fantarombo. A glance at the tracklist is enough to suggest that something wickedly mischievous is afoot. The title itself combines fantasia (fantasy) and rombo (rhombus), while the track titles abound in playful neologisms, and improbable compounds with words being given cutesy, stylized Italian endings (“Gigabitto”) or affectionate diminutives “Tatuagiotti Multistrato” (Multi-layered Cute Tattoos). These, it turns out, are all words from a surreal story printed on the back of the album sleeve.
Gone are the tape manipulation experiments, the field based works recorded on the volcanic site of Solfatara, Pozzuoli Naples, and the meditation on the arrangement of sound events over successive layers, like a patina laying onto a renewed surface, recorded on tape.
On Fantarombo, sounds emerge from an interconnected modular system, its clocks, sequences and feedback loops generating unpredictable encounters. Yet the shift is not simply technological. Where his earlier compositions often seemed preoccupied with the traces left by sounds undergoing transformation, here the emphasis falls on what might happen next.
“Gigabitto” opens in an erratic, seemingly randomised fashion, with whirring and scurrying sounds springing from nooks and crannies like the workings of a malfunctioning magic music box. “Bradipsico”, whose title suggests a collision between slothfulness and psychic activity, evokes the electronic sound effects of 1950s science-fiction films, while “Tropi Tristi”, a playful inversion of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques, drips with synthetic exotica. On “Tatuaggiotti Multistrato”, melodic fragments and rhythmic pulses collide before settling into an unlikely, almost accidental synthesis. “Graffiotosto Serpeggione” is a writhing mass of slithering, squelching sounds, as though some imaginary creature were trying to extricate itself from the circuitry.
There is an abstract, cartoonish quality to this acoustic environment, populated by sounds that suggest objects, gestures and creatures without ever quite assuming recognisable forms. “Lune Stralunanti” stages an elaborate game of percussive exchanges, while “Ciocco Neronotte”, which closes the first side, is baffling and bewildering in equal measure. Yet for all its apparent wackiness, Fantarombo is is carefully judged in its pace, its sudden detours and unexpected encounters controlled without sacrificing their spontaneity. At times, rapid repetitions blur into continuous textures, while pitched sounds acquire a percussive character, dissolving the distinctions between rhythm, melody and timbre.
The second side is given over entirely to “Messer Tufo”, an extended excursion into a parallel sonic universe where reverberations stretch into cavernous spaces and sounds collide like distant galaxies or communicate like alien lifeforms. The album’s artwork, with its mutating organic forms and disembodied anatomical fragments scattered across a carpet of synthetic vegetation, seems an apt visual counterpart to this peculiar electroacoustic ecosystem.
What makes Fantarombo particularly engaging is that its exuberance never feels like an exercise in randomness for its own sake. Lami has not abandoned his longstanding fascination with instability, transformation and the residual traces of sound; he has simply relocated them from the physical degradation of recorded material to the unpredictable behaviour of an electronic system. The result is a record of unexpected colour and humour, where apparent accidents are allowed to flourish within carefully calibrated structures. It is as though Lami has exchanged the archaeological patience of his earlier work for the mischievous curiosity of an inventor, delighted by the strange creatures his machines have brought into being. It is not by accident than that Fantarombo has landed on Discrepant, home to the weird and wonderous.
photo by Carolina Martines
To uncover the production process for Fantarombo we spoke directly with Giovanni Lami.
On Eikon you started with acoustic cello recordings and gradually dismantled them until the original material was almost absent. Fantarombo seems to start somewhere else, with the modular system itself providing the material. What prompted that change in your way of working?
I had spent many years starting from sounds that already contained a history of some kind, whether they were field recordings, acoustic instruments or material recorded onto tape. With Eikon this was particularly clear: the cello recordings existed first, and much of the composition came from dismantling and gradually distancing myself from them until their original identity became almost irrelevant. At some point I became curious about starting one step earlier, with no original object that needed to be preserved, transformed or erased. With projects such as Hysteresis I was already treating the machine itself as an instrument and listening to its behaviour, while with Fantarombo I followed that direction much further.
This also coincided with my growing interest in open-source devices and the communities around them. I really like the way knowledge circulates there: people building things, modifying them, explaining how they work and sharing results simply because they might be useful to someone else. These environments are often remarkably generous and respectful, and they made me think of an electronic instrument less as a closed object and more as something provisional, continually reconfigured through use and exchange.
So I started building interconnected processes where material could emerge from the behaviour of the system itself: sequences, clocks, feedback, MIDI data, modulation, things accumulating or drifting apart. In a sense I moved from transforming an existing sound to constructing conditions in which sounds could happen.
There is also a practical side to this. I wanted a setup compact enough to travel easily, but open enough to change according to the situation. The live work doesn’t need to reproduce the record: the same small core can become a concentrated rhythmic set or something slower and more extended, without losing its sonic character.
Error and imperfection have been important in your work for a long time, particularly the interference and degradation introduced by recording and playback technologies. How has your relationship with error changed on Fantarombo, where instability seems to come increasingly from the behaviour of the electronic system itself?
I think my idea of error has gradually become less connected to damage or degradation. With tape and recording technologies I was very interested in what happened to a sound when a medium failed to reproduce it perfectly: changes in speed, saturation, noise, physical wear, repeated copying, all those small interferences that slowly changed the identity of the source. In Fantarombo the instability has moved deeper into the logic of the system. It can come from clocks that do not completely agree with each other, MIDI streams behaving in unexpected ways, different devices interacting, or several processes running simultaneously without being perfectly synchronised.
I’m not particularly interested in manufacturing “errors” as effects, or in error as a kind of glitch aesthetic. What interests me is creating a situation in which I cannot predict every consequence of what I do. There is still a lot of decision-making and control, especially through listening, but the system can answer in ways I hadn’t planned in detail.
So maybe error has become less of an event and more of a relationship between intention and behaviour. The interesting point is often that small distance between what I ask a system to do and what actually happens.
There are moments on Fantarombo when very fast repetitions become almost continuous textures, while pitched sounds begin functioning as percussion. How interested are you in that point where rhythm, texture and pitch become difficult to separate, and did working on this album lead you further in that direction?
Very much. I think this became one of the central interests of the record.
One thing I like about working with modular systems is that categories such as rhythm, pitch and modulation are technically very close to each other. A repetition can become so fast that you stop perceiving individual events and begin hearing a texture or a pitch; something pitched can become almost entirely percussive through its duration, envelope or repetition. I became increasingly interested in moving through these thresholds without necessarily deciding in advance what something was supposed to be.
This blurring of rhythm, pitch and texture is also part of why I sometimes think of Fantarombo as a kind of electroacoustic fiction. Some sounds seem to suggest instruments, gestures or ensembles that aren’t really there, while small melodic or rhythmic figures can feel strangely familiar without referring to any identifiable source. I’ve been calling some of these “synthetic folk traces”: patterns that can feel remembered or inherited even though they have been generated inside a completely synthetic environment.
The rhythmic side of the record also grew from layering processes with different internal times. Rhythm stopped feeling like a structure underneath the sounds and became another property of the sounds themselves.
Much of your previous work has dealt with memory, shadows and traces of sounds whose original identity has been transformed. Do those ideas still inform Fantarombo, even though the record feels much more immediate and playful, or do you see it as the beginning of a different phase in your work?
Those ideas are definitely still present, although I think their position has changed.
In many of my previous works memory was embedded quite literally in the material. Bias and Eikon are probably the clearest examples of this. With Fantarombo, memory has somehow moved from the material into the behaviour of the system. Even when an element disappears, the system may remain altered by what happened before. So there are still traces and residues, but they are temporal and operational instead of being attached to a recorded source. At the same time, I do see Fantarombo as the beginning of a different phase in terms of energy and attitude. It is a brighter record, less dark than much of what I made before, more playful and definitely more rhythmic. I don’t think this came from a conscious decision to change direction as much as from changes in my own listening.
Listening is porous, fortunately. The music you spend time with, the exchanges you have and especially the people closest to you inevitably alter what enters your ears. Carolina, my partner, has been very important in this sense. We listen to a lot of music together and come from quite different backgrounds and sensitivities, so things constantly pass between us without necessarily becoming direct references. I think this permeability gave me permission to let more colour, repetition, awkwardness, rhythm and pleasure into the work without abandoning the things I had been interested in before.
The live form follows the same logic: what interests me is keeping the same sonic vocabulary while allowing its proportions, density and sense of time to change according to the space and the people there. Maybe the clearest difference is this: I used to be very interested in what remains after a sound has been transformed, while with Fantarombo I became more interested in how one sound can alter the conditions for what follows.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
