If this is all looking a bit familiar, that’s because we already spoke about Alos and her new album/book ‘Embrace The Darkness’ for the current The Devil’s Month volume published yesterday. There’s a little bit of overlap, sure, but anything that will make this project reach more people is never too much, as it really is something special, something different, something meaningful, that deserves to find as many listeners as possible. As you probably are aware by now, Alos is Stefania Pedretti, one half of the amazing/terrifying experimental noise rock duo OvO (who have been delightful guests on a heavily recommended previous episode of our podcast), and her solo career under this name has already featured quite a few remarkable gems. I’m a big fan of the ‘Era’ (2012), ‘Matrice’ (2015) and ‘The Chaos Awakening’ (2018) tapes in particular, Stefania has a knack for turning something that can be as abstract as a live performance of a ritual into something that can also function as a “normal” record that you listen to over and over, and those are perfect examples of this. She’s also collaborated with many incredible artists, and her records with the great Xabier Iriondo (of Buñuel, Afterhours and many others, and again, a marvellous guest on an awesome past episode of the podcast) are also highly recommended. Still, ‘Embrace The Darkness’ is different and feels like a sort of departure even for an artist already completely out there in the outer fringes of experimentation and creativity.
The starting point for its inspiration wasn’t the best of things - Stefania went through a tough time helath-wise, and after a lengthy hospitalization, when most of us might have still be trying to catch our bearings, this major artist was already turning the experience into art in her mind, and a few months after she was clinking objects together, abusing a modular synth in ways that it had never been abused before, and letting loose her primal, harrowing yet exquisitely beautiful voice on the slopes of a volcano. As the very detailed accompanying press release explains, shortly after returning home, “the idea of elaborating the experience with a performance was born. The volcano emerged as the chosen symbolic system to create a synthesis and a narration before and beyond the human, tracing a path that could lead from darkness to light.” This record is precisely that, a journey of healing, but also of searching. Closure for the past, but also experimentation, opening new avenues for the future. And once more, Stefania’s talent was able to make something so personal and so potentially abstract into art, yes, but also, ultimately, entertaiment. Precious few other “ambient” albums will captivate you like this one will, few will feel as genuine and as enveloping as this one, and very few will make you actually feel like you’re on the slopes of the volcano next to her if you let yourself go while listening to it. It’s not only music, either - this is a luxurious release that combines sound, visuals, and texts, consisings of a 12” vinyl record and an artist’s book. It looks fantastic and you should go get it as soon as possible - not many are left!
There’s little use in talking about ‘Embrace The Darkness’ much more. This is the kind of thing you should just dive into and let it consume you, and I guarantee it’ll provide you with one of the deepest musical experiences of the year. So I’ll just leave you with the words of another major artist, the one and only Colin H. Van Eeckhout of Amenra, about this unique piece. And then, after the jump, the lovely Stefania was kind enough to have a great chat with The Devil’s Mouth, so don’t miss that.
“A timeless glimpse into the artistic sphere of Stefania aka Alos. It allows you to listen and look through her lense, her senses. And ultimately feel what Stromboli's nature was trying to tell her. Be it a cave, or vulcano, ?Alos is the ultimate vehicle to take you out of yourself and into that other essential being. The last years have made her see and unsee the depths of life, and she has her story to tell. The world and we, as witnesses, are blessed with the presence of the archaic motherartist and modern witch that she is. She has our story to tell. Embrace the Darkness and worship the Light.” - CHVE
You can find Alos on Bandcamp, Facebook, Instagram and Spotify.
’Embrace The Darkness’ is out now as a combined edition via Dio Drone, Archaeological Records and Occulto magazine.
“The volcano really healed me. I arrived there so weak that I could only walk for short distances, and when I left I had even climbed the volcano.”
- Stefania ‘Alos’ Pedretti
As it has been explained, the origins of these latest Rituals you have performed come from your long illness and hospitalization period. I think it’s incredible that you turned such a difficult experience into art like this. When did you first have this idea, and what were your initial intentions with it? Is this for you a sort of healing, of turning a negative, dark event into something luminous and inspiring?
Stefania: Actually, the vision of ‘Embrace The Darkness’ started even before my diseases, I imagined a new Ritual (after the previous one, ‘The Chaos Awakening’) that would explore our dark side and our deeper emotions, a sound that would teach us to embrace them. But I only started to work on it after my hospitalization, when I was in a new and unpredictable state, both on a physical and emotional level. I found myself living on my own skin the Ritual that I was previously studying. So, as you said, it became a healing process, through very dark moments in which I made little solitary rituals by night. They were imprinted in my way of performing and I brought them to Stromboli, where I conceived and recorded the new album.
Would you like to explain a little more about the choice of the volcano to be the main symbol in your narrative?
Stefania: For many years my work has focused on the SOUTH, on a warm imagery, different from the typical northern metal and magik one, mostly related to forests and cold. I love that too, but I feel the need for something else, and I live in the Mediterranean area, in Italy. So, together with Giulio Di Mauro of Archaeological Records (who also curated the aesthetics of the project with his photographs and videos) we visualised the volcano and its symbology, which became the perfect sign of my healing path: unpredictable, silent or erupting, uniting the depths of the center of the Earth with the Sky. I believe there is nothing as symbolic and powerful. We chose Stromboli, a little island with a unique ever-active volcano. I contacted the curator of Marosi Festival who was enthusiastic of the idea and who invited me to an artistic residency there, in June 2022.
Give this whole context, how was the process of creation? Was it more painful or
more difficult than usual? Or did it feel positive and healing already during that
period? Or maybe a mix of both?
Stefania: Me and my team (Marcello Batelli: sound designer, Giulio Di Mauro: photographer and video maker, Francesca Morello: partner and assistant) went to Stromboli with a lot of ideas, not knowing exactly how we could have realise them, considering that pretty much everything was going to be field-recorded in nature. A nature that none of us knew, being our first time on the island. But we were ready for this adventure, with all of its hitches. It was fantastic but hard for me at the same time, because when I arrived there I could barely walk after my health problems, I was very weak and my voice was just back after the intubation. But the volcano (Iddu) embraced and healed me. I got involved not knowing if I would make it, but, with the help of the wonderful people that were there with me, my team and the Marosi festival team, I have been reborn.
As you mentioned, this Ritual also comes specifically from that residency you had in
Marosi in 2022? Can you describe a little bit of the atmosphere that happened in
those performances?
Stefania: Yeah, as I said before, it was born during an artistic residency in Stromboli, where I was invited by the adventurous multi-disciplinary festival Marosi. Stromboli is a small sicilian island whose volcano is ever-active, with a peculiar volcanic activity. I spent ten residency days there in June 2022 and I came back in September to present my new Ritual II. As I said, I was there with my team: the sound engineer Marcello Batelli, who did the audio field recordings and later mixed the record, Giulio Di Mauro, who silently shot the pics which became the book and record artwork, and who also shot both the visuals for the Ritual and the videoclip, and Francesca Morello, my wife and artist known as R.Y.F., who came as an assistant. Every day we went to discover a special place on the island, with our microphones, cameras and instruments on our shoulders, we arrived in the chosen place and we set up a little open air recording studio. The first days weren't easy, we had to adapt to the place and the method, and it wasn't easy for me, because it was just my voice, objects and nature, no musical drone or anything else that I could refer to while I was singing. Just me and the landscape. An incredible experience. I can say I did many little rituals in different locations, some of them even became tracks titles, like Grotta di Eolo, the first place we discovered. A sea cave, inaccessible with high tide, with a very specific acoustic due to its sand soil, which stopped the typical reverb that we imagine in a cave. It sounded muffled, I can't fully describe it, I can just say it really felt like being in a hollow, with its black sand and black rocks (the whole island is black because of the volcano). Another unique experience was going up the volcano at 5 in the morning with a guide to record near the Sciara Del Fuoco, at 7 a.m. recording my voice and glass objects close to enormous volcanic boulders, with birds singing, lit by the just-risen sun. And finally going to the most remote corner of the island, only accessible by dinghy, to record the wind in the reedbed.
I know it’s something you’ve done before, but did you always envision having these performances also become something physical and lasting, like this record? Is it hard to transmit things through this medium, without the “being there” factor, did you ever have any doubts about it?
Stefania: So far my performances always became records, since the first one exactly twenty years ago. Yep, this year Alos turns twenty! My first performance consisted in cooking vegan food and sharing it with the audience, and it became an album (‘Ricordi Indelebili’) released by Bar La Muerte, the label owned by Bruno Dorella, my partner in OvO. After that it felt natural imagining the phonographic transposition of the performances. I have to say that at the moment I'm imagining more and more complex performances, related to artistic and theatrical residencies, and I don't know if they'll all become records. Next spring I'm starting to work on a Ritual III which will involve 13 year old kids, it's hard to imagine a record of it. But.. never say never. It's always been hard, and it still is, to transpose something so physical and emotional, so merged with the audience into something that's just sound. It's a challenge, and it's part of the reason why we decided to publish a book together with this new album. The pictures may bring the listeners to Stromboli, following some little recommendations given at the beginning of the book, hoping they will be able to achieve their little ritual.
What do you feel when you listen to this final product, and also seeing the videos –
does this keep having an effect on you, is it also a part of this journey to realise how
far you’ve come and what you’ve accomplished?
Stefania: You can't imagine the emotions I'm feeling, now that I can touch and browse these objects that I had in mind for almost two years. Re-listening to the LP was magic, putting the needle on this lava-coloured vinyl, sitting down and enjoying the sound was a surprise. There are so many field recordings that I felt transported to the island. What a wonderful sensation, that residency and the volcano really healed me. I arrived there so weak that I could only walk for short distances, and when I left I had even climbed the volcano. This thing, even more than all my previous records, makes me really proud of myself. It doesn't matter how much it will sell, how much visibility it will have and so on, I'm sincerely proud I made it, it makes me feel alive and I want to thank again my super team, Marosi festival, the labels Dio Drone and Archaeological records and the publisher Occulto that believed in me and in this project.
How do you think people will react? On one hand, it’s a completely enveloping and
very unusual piece of ambient music, on the other hand, it’s also a very personal
thing. What do you think listeners can take from this, what do you think your
experience can teach us?
Stefania: Very nice question, who knows, I hope that, exactly because of the things you pointed, people will let themselves go, getting out of the music stereotypes and listening to it in a particular moment of their day, maybe feeling that it's doing good to them, maybe it will even resonate in their personal experience. All of us suffered and have experienced physical or psychological fragility for different reasons, and what I tried to transmit with this album is not to fear the darkside, but to embrace it and take it by the hand in order to find a way to something good. I hope it doesn't sound like a pre-packaged speech, as I experienced it myself and, slowly, hand in hand with suffering, I'm finding my peace of mind again.
Would you like to explain a little bit more in detail how the actual “playing” of the
sounds took place? Like, what objects you used and how, what was the balance
between improvisation planning, that sort of thing?
Stefania: The main instrument is my voice, which, at the time of the recordings, was just recovered after three months of logopaedic treatment, because I lost it during my intubation at the hospital. My vocal cords were like broken sliding doors… Then we had a DIY modular synth (Benjolin by Macumbista), many bells which I used in the previous record too, and GLASS! This is the new arrival and my new love. For this record I wanted new objects to recall fire, sand, fragility but also eternity, and glass is all of these. I'm lucky to know Silvia Levenson, an Argentinian emigrated in Italy to escape dictatorship. She's one of the most important glass artists. Silvia and my friend Natalia, her daughter, chose some discards from her works, and they sent them to me, a bit surprised by my request... I'm very happy with their sound and how they resonated in contact with the different rocks of Stromboli. The recordings have been a hybrid between improvisation and parts that I had in my mind for months, or parts that I tried in the first drafts of the ritual. I would say improvisation is predominant because everything has been live recorded, and the surrounding sound had a strong impact on what I played. After years of putting aside my love for improvisation, and for listening in harmony with the surrounding environment, I'm happy this side of me is now re-emerging.
Do you plan to keep doing performances like this, will this be the main vehicle of
expression for your Alos side now, you think?
Stefania: I would say yes for now, I like this hazardous path, I find it enriching. For the future I don't know, as I am always in search of new expression methods I may start some new path.
I’m sure you get this question a lot, but in this case I think it’s very appropriate – did
any of this experience influence your work in OvO too? Being such an intimate thing, do you feel it changed you as an artist in all respects?
Stefania: I don't know how, but for sure it'll influence OvO too. My life is different than before and my way of approaching music is now different as well. Usually I try to keep the Alos and OvO styles separated but they're still deeply connected. The amazing point is that in OvO there is Bruno and he is really different from me and together we always find new balances and visions to follow.