Simple man, simple needs
Villa LaMura, Chiusi
For the best part of five years I’ve been moving away from hands-on music — guitars, keys, sax — and deeper into electronic production. It’s been a steep learning curve that I’ve relished. Most months I finished one, sometimes two tracks, treating each piece as an exercise: learn a tool, test a technique, stretch into a genre, make something musical out of it. As fluency grew, so did intent; decisions got cleaner, mixes more confident, the writing more deliberate.
Then I hit a wall. Four works-in-progress stalled sequentially. I kept prodding at harmony, instrumentation and arrangement — usually where problems live for me — but nothing moved. The music felt like it had run out of freshness, and the process felt like it had stopped teaching me anything new.
In October I travelled to Umbria, where Christine was taking part in a mixed-media masterclass near Chiusi, a beautiful Etruscan hill town with big skies and ancient olive groves. We stayed at Villa Le Mura, all cool stone, wide rooms and long shadows — the kind of place where time seems to slow. I was only going along for the ride, but it quickly became obvious this was the break I needed.
While the painters and collage artists worked in the limonaia-cum-studio and the villa’s owners harvested their olives (we tasted the new oil, peppery and green, that evening at supper), I set up in the villa’s cavernous cantina. No notifications, no chores, no half-finished mixes hassling from the desktop — just a laptop, headphones and headspace. The revelation wasn’t dramatic: fresh environment, fresh ears. Distance turned the four problem children into four opportunities. Each track already had a strong idea buried inside; it just needed a different angle, or a simpler process, or a nudge in the opposite direction to the one I’d been pushing.
This series is the story of how those pieces finally came home:
Esser lieto — ditching complexity, embracing a simple generator and modulation to keep the music breathing.
Chi si passa — escaping choice paralysis; letting the bass and percussion carry the narrative.
Mea culpa — fixing the low end so the quiet details could finally speak.
Non v’è certezza — trusting the track that showed up, not the one I planned; adding groove, then building a shared sonic space.
Sometimes the fix is a technique; often it’s permission — to step back, to change the order of decisions, to give something important the time it quietly deserves. This trip gave me that, and the music followed.