Day Before Us Interview

1.For those that have never heard of you before, can you tell us a little bit about the musical project?

This project saw the light back in 2012 after several experiments for various collective works, including a conceptual album (Flatland, for a romance of many dimensions) in collaboration with G.L Baroncini (Krell)…My first recordings mainly include processed and looped piano patterns in a very lo-fi, primitive recording style. Thanks to my meeting with Giuseppe Verticchio (Nimh, Hall of Mirrors) it encouraged a new turn and I started more consistently to think about writing and releasing materials under my own project name. My musical identity and aesthetic sensibility naturally lead me to explore various soundscapes which could encourage a feeling of solemn quietude and introspective mood on the listener.

2.So far you have put out 4 releases and have been a part of a compilation, can you tell us a little bit more about your musical sound and also how has it evolved over the years?

As a piano player I’ve been primarily formed in classical music. I took this learning background to the fore when I’m composing but I became rapidly more and more interested to psych-acoustic potentials, sensorial environment and the phenomenon of perception around “sound colors”, tonal colors” and temporal quality. Surfing on ambient music and particularly its industrial, isolationist, ritual and organic dimensions enable me to accomplish a bridge between more neoclassical instrumentals around the piano and transversal explorations on timbres or various sound sources. From the album “under Mournful Horizons”, until “Misty shroud of regrets” and the last EP “Child of a new light” I’ve injected a dose of new ideas and compositional schemas but keeping in mind a certain continuity in terms of “cinematic” approach and emphasize on processed acoustic sound motifs.

3.What are some of the concepts and images, you bring out with your music?

I’m sincerely thinking about a poetical art whose essence could be musical, which means turned to a state of internal ravishment and intimate relationship toward the nature and even the divine around invisible / visible intertwined manifestations, subjective temporality, sentimental reveries and the existential sense of human destiny. Because of this I’m profoundly touched by vertical properties of listening experience. All concepts around the Taedium vitae, the sunt lachrimae rerum or the Japanese Mono no aware help me to enrich and stimulate my thought around those leading themes that I’m trying to translate in my musical continuums and piano based flowing hymns to the universal-spiritual ego.


4.According to the fb page some of your non musical influences include the empyrean heaven, lost paradises, euro paganism, inner church, the anatomy of melancholia, portraitism, and the grey hours of despair, can you tell us a little bit more about your interest in these topics?

This is a corpus of influences mainly taken from literature, from Dante’s metaphorical world, to metaphysical, politico-religious and anti-materialistic visions of Friedrich Hielscher or Ernst Jünger, to poetically melancholic meditations of romantic authors mainly from Germany (Sturm und drang, Bidermaier, weltchmerz movements), French “poètes maudits” and foreign poets linked to this tormented existential sensibility (the Italian Dino Campana, the Georgian Terentin Graneli or the Greek Kostas Kariotakis). Outside of rational-positivist attitudes which dominate our modern thought, those authors tried to investigate on the secret, mystical and shadowy parts of human nature and self-reliance, this under a more immediate, personal, intimate, affective view which admits a closer relationship to music as a spiritual vehicle.

5.On one of your albums you have also taken inspiration from Georg Trackl, Ludwig Tiek, and Nicholis Leneu, can you tell us a little bit more about these poets?

This is a circle of poets who are currently associated to the Weltchmerz movement and who next to Novalis encourages the rising of the mystical romanticism turned to visionary elements and to this search of an intimate link between the absolute transparent beauty and lyrical ecstasy in a world condemned to spiritual despair. These are authors who directly inspired me to compose the album “Autumnal wandering” which features a few spoken words taken from a few representative poems.

6.What is the meaning and inspiration behind the name 'Day Before Us'?

This name is really enigmatic and deeply spiritual for me. It is taken from a devotion-like poem by Flower Adams. I like to feel an implicit reliance between the world of the dead and our existential path, those few words translate it very well and are an invitation to self-meditation on human temporality, generational transcendence.


7.Recently you have added a new member, do you feel this adds to the music sounding more powerful on the new release?

My music is resolutely narrative and cinematic. Early 2013 I discovered the singer Effrosyni Papamichalopoulou (from the apocalyptical folk band Decadence) and after having listened to her first experiments on my instrumentals I was thinking that the lyrical component would help to follow such “cinematic / narrative” direction with more nuances and sense of achievement. We started to exchange on a mutual basis and rapidly found a great level of understanding about a singular way to encourage this communication between sound lyricism, cinematic soundscapes and subjective poetical inclination. I’m deeply satisfied by the musical signature we accomplished on our last opus. The third full length release we are preparing will follow the same musical path with maybe more densely orchestrated parts for a very colorful dark ambient / dark waving score sustained by profoundly evocative lyrical embellishment.


8.Over the years you have worked with many different labels, do you feel these labels have been very helpful when it comes to getting your music out there heard?

I’m very grateful to each of them, whatever their size and policy to promote signed artists in their respective structures. Rage in Eden has been particularly helpful to enlarge the audience because of the more standard type of edition but also because they distribute published materials to various renowned labels / distributors (Malignant Records, Steinklang, Cold Spring…) in the particular dark ambient / industrial / neo-folk underground and independent world.

9.On a worldwide level how has the feedback been to your music by fans of ambient?

Curiously or not, listeners come from an extreme diversity of musical communities, I mean not only from the ambient-deep listening world but also from the metal, gothic, ethereal pop and electronic music universe. Geographically and culturally speaking I would like to say that is also very diversified, from western Europe, to Asia and South / north America. The most important is to keep the music universal and to be convinced that is a way to facilitate fruitful exchanges also from the creative side. I’m deeply satisfied by my recent collaborative works with musicians but also visual artists from abroad, it definitely helps to feel immersed in an authentic “community of feelings and visions” that goes beyond the strict artistic dimension.

10.According to the fb page you have a new album in the works, can you tell us a little bit more about it?

As mentioned above the new album will develop a stylistic bridge between the more post-industrial dark ambient facet of my first efforts and the lyrical neoclassical folk-ish side of the last EP with the add of a few challenging ideas I can not reveal now. The writing process is now finalized. I’m improving the technical side. Logically the album will be out this autumn on Twilight Records for a similar edition to my past releases for Rage in Eden.  

11.What are some of the bands or musical styles that have had an influence on your music and also what are you listening to nowadays?

When I’m connecting myself to the creative process I’m trying to make abstraction of musical influences despite those can be advocated unconsciously. I’m following my own musical path without thinking of being affiliated to any musical genres. However my musical background and listening interest are mainly turned to the neotonal minimalist schoo in its wide diversity, from East Europe (Arvo Part…) from the American side (Moondog, Terry Riley, Rhys Chatam…), also classical symphonic music (from Bruckner, Gliere…). From contemporaries I really appreciate the picturesque, evocatively dense and doom-like atmospheric musical universe of Bohren und der club of gore among others.

12.What are some of your non musical interests?

Various intellectual topics in anthroposophy, in philosophical anthropology, sophiology  because of the holistic view on human being, also because it is taking into consideration the noumenal / ontological side of our existence outside of the mutilations generated by the corrosive positivism thought which rules this world. My interest also goes to the “cinema of poetry” (from Andrei Tarkovski, Frantisek Vlacil, …) linked to literature, also folklore, mythological and historic-religious studies.

13>Before we wrap up this interview, do you have any final words or thoughts?

Many thanks for your interest in our project and especially for bringing to metal fans new musical horizons which could admit implicit connections / influences on a few bands.

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