Interview with Martux_m by Rogelio Pereira

Interview with M. Martusciello by Rogelio Pereira

A: It started around the 1990s, a time when my musical experiences (rock, jazz, etc.) had reached a stalemate. I remember with what naive enthusiasm the discovery of concrete music revitalized the possibility of continuing, in a new and dynamic form, an experience with the world of sound through a completely new modality. Until then, my relationship with recording had been limited to documenting a sound event. From that moment on, recording became this “formless principle” that, when manipulated, edited, and fixed onto a medium, became a “body” imposing itself in a hidden, transcendent compositional principle that is not inherently audible.

A: To seek an imaginable in imagination, an unthinkable in thought, to give life to a hybrid thought capable of holding together concept and sensation, truth and horror, spirit and body. A place of metamorphosis and transformation, a place where one cannot linger for more than an instant, a landscape with frayed and mutable boundaries.

A: This dislocation, this desituation frees the shadow that dwells in the sound body, which is its soul, and takes on a life of its own from the horrendous clots of blood and humors, in the filth of the womb, which like the speaker, prolapses to form a “glorious body.” A fluctuating time, fluctuating lines, the Aion opposed to Cronos, “a clock that produces variable speeds.” The obsessive search for that place, or “non-place,” where life and death touch, where there is all the meaning of our existence, to understand the point of intersection of the timeless with time, which, as Eliot says, is the occupation of saints.

A: Improvisation belongs to that space of “beginning” without knowing where the thing began and where it might lead, if beginning did not always and in any case mean continuing. We are a mass, an interweaving of stories, and improvisation makes the handful of dust I hold in my hands become a home again, a landscape, a face that once smiled at me, and that had disappeared into the oblivion of the past. Pushing further, ensuring that the sound-meeting penetrates and corrupts everything, undermining being, making it falter. Sound-bodies colliding, cutting, penetrating. Relationships between unformed elements, relatively unformed, of movements and stillness, of speed and slowness; sound molecules or particles composing themselves carried by flows.

A: The disruptive desire that turns to objects and makes them lovable. This is Eros. But it is always about intersecting things, never reducing them. A cartography, never a symbolism.

A: I had never had experiences in other artistic fields at the time of Meta-Harmonies and Inside. So my different ways of operating in the genesis of sound in those works depend on something else. Some of the motivations can be found in my response to your previous question, in that embrace that leads to every foreign land, and in the loss one proceeds forward, like dogs desperately digging the ground.

A: Multiple singularities; fluctuations that form like figures on the crest of waves. Mobile and communicative singularities that penetrate into each other through an infinity of degrees, an infinity of modifications. An increase in sensoriality: sensations of matter; speed of movement: uncoded elements of languages. A disturbing interzone between impure cinema and sound architectures, crossings, displacements, in search of desiring tensions, a sexualized encounter that severs dualisms, remixes differences, relocates concepts. A fascinating world where the identity of the self is lost, not for the benefit of the identity of the one or the unity of the whole, but for the benefit of an intense multiplicity and a power of metamorphosis.

A: Exactly. It is the state of what must be called “complicatio” against “simplificatio.” Sound-bodies are languages because essentially they are “flexion,” bodily flexion liberated from everything that ordinarily hides it. Bringing forth such an image is power, the impact of copulation. Lines of articulation, segmentarity, layers, territoriality; but also lines of flight, movements of deterritorialization, comparative speeds, viscosity, contractions, spasms, precipitations and ruptures, action on bodies of invisible forces. Sound-bodies suspended in hesitation that develop all the senses of disjunction. Disjunctive articulation, where sound-bodies contain a hidden language, the most abstract argumentation.

A: Exactly the same way, but with a completely opposite space-time relationship. On stage, your relationship with time is chronological; everything that is born lives parallel to your experience in that segment of your life, like an encounter. In the studio, it is completely different; making time sensitive, making it audible, eternal. It is an immeasurable task, beyond any time or cadence.

A: Live, you open by appealing to the complicity of the audience; you are in direct contact with “the other.” Everything coexists and intertwines in an arabesque where everything is present in a loving and erotic embrace. In the recording studio, playing live with the absence of an audience becomes just a strategy, a technique for producing sound worlds, in a communication subtracted from the laws of exchange in any case, an asymmetric relationship.

A: All this constitutes a concatenation that makes it an organism, a significant totality, a body without organs that transmits directly—avoiding any expedient—on the nerve wave, in living flesh. Disjunctive articulation, where sound-bodies contain a hidden language. Plane of longitude and latitude, which opposes a plane of organization: “Flatness, Rhizosphere, Hypersphere.”

A: By not working together but in between, negotiating. Never finding oneself on the same wavelength, but always slightly shifted, in a parallel evolution, where each deterritorializes in the other. To steal; as I hope all the others do with me.

A: No, it is not like that at all. As I mentioned earlier, live there is a completely different condition than in the studio, just as it is entirely different to improvise with other musicians or alone, or to work in the studio instead of on stage. These are all binary situations but none has primacy over the others. In each of these conditions, I express something different, and to this day, none of my works has supremacy as the top of the class.

A: I don’t believe in this type of meetings; in my opinion, these exist only for reasons of convenience. All these definitions are formalizations, slogans only for power apparatuses. The problem does not lie in defining or categorizing what one is doing; in this way, the spectacle’s managers—the undertakers of art—are favored. We must abandon all forms of solid concept: electroacoustic, sound art, new music, etc., are solid binary definitions; we must proclaim the death of every form of dominion that seeks to impose order and authority of one over the other. We must uproot every root and build sexed paths of dislocation of every discipline, of every method.

A: I don’t know what you mean by improvised music, whether improvised music as a sound processing technique, or if you refer to a very specific aesthetic. As a technique, I believe it is practiced more or less in the same way as it was practiced in the past, but certainly, one cannot say that there is a new improvised music. This, I believe, depends above all on a condition that has radically changed. You know, our societies are increasingly alienating what are the universes of value, and by this I mean constellations of values, heterogeneous and singularizing. Improvisation as an aesthetic is a cultural expression on the verge of extinction. Unfortunately, in a society where market laws are increasingly shifting towards establishing common opinion and more retrogressive power forces, improvisation becomes one of those disappearing spaces, which clearly remains an aesthetic paradigm that goes in the opposite direction. This means that it is increasingly difficult for me to find a replacement for historical groups and musicians of the improvisational scene, which can bring new aesthetic mutations like those of Evan Parker, Derek Bailey, or Han Bennink.

A: Sharing the stage is sharing a space of life, a space of time. It is a space-time where creating a “disjunctive articulation” is essential; thus, an essential relationship emerges, where one exercises our active conduct towards reflexes, echoes, and doubles, to collect them and to evoke them, to give rise to a multiplicity. Clearly, in a concert, the relationship with the listener is a fundamental concatenation, constitutes a necessary reason.

A: Metaxu and Z.e.l.l.e. are very different projects, but both involve friendships and music. What matters in these projects is not working together but working in between because for something to happen, there must be a potential difference, two levels, and then something happens. It is not about having the same ideas but understanding each other without needing to explain oneself. It’s about having a common language, or better yet, having a pre-language in common. An evolution in parallel, producing something that is found neither in one nor in the other, to realize a multiplicity. Deterritorializing oneself in the other, reinventing alterity, in a relationship of fascination; I have stolen from them as I hope they have done with me.

I don’t know yet what my next publications will be; I have recently completed a new CD under the name Dogon together with Massimo Pupillo from Zu and Filippo Paolini, then there is my very latest electroacoustic work “Dissectio” composed in the G.E.M.A. studios in Albi, with which I am working for its publication. You ask if I will remain faithful to my electroacoustic and experimental concepts; with the concept of fidelity comes that of betrayal, and I feel like telling you that empiricists are not theorists but experimenters; they never interpret, they have no principles, every experimenter must be a traitor, who does not seek something to conquer or an established order but to create, then disappear, become unknown, lose one’s identity, one’s face, seek the anomalous, which is always found on the frontier, on the edge of a chasm.