ATŌMI: MUSIC

Today we met Lorenzo Setti, a Berlin based musician, who’s solo project ATŌMI, reveals his extreme compositional flexibility as an electronic music producer.

I’m a curious child and a creative adult, in a process of inner discovery. I love human and nature expressions that go above words and language through symbols and patterns. I also love to express and challenge myself mostly through music but also with poetry, writing and analog photography. I strongly believe that everything is connected and lots can be understood through frequencies, vibrations and energy.

I started taking drum lessons when I was six after two years of uninterrupted beatboxing. That was my initiation and after more than ten years of playing shows and recording in studios around Europe and USA, I approached music production as a solo artist in 2016 because of the need to find new stimuli and more complete ways of expressing my sensitivity and emotions.

My first approach to music production came about because of my father's request to compose a 50-minute soundtrack for a video he shot at dawn in a completely deserted village in southern Italy, then in 2020 I released my debut EP “ARMØNIA” through the Japanese label Jikken Records, followed by several installations, AR and VR projects as well as taking part in humanitarian aid compilations. After the collaboration with the Italian violinist and composer Laura Masotto on the track Water Water of her album, I asked her and the opera singer Giulia Bernardi to take part in the recordings of my latest album “Little Floating Oracles” released by Lady Blunt Records in Oct. 2022.

Your greatest inspirations or influences?

I discovered myself being inspired or, even better, contaminated in the most unexpected situation of my life. I can be inspired by a specific moment or place, a person, an animal or a plant, a little piece of paper with something written on it found somewhere on the street, a painting by William Turner or an illustration by Folon. I’m in constant evolution and in constant research of new inspirations. I often question myself about “the filters” that constrain my path in “well defined” roads. Those filters, related to my background, are something that I constantly try to be aware of and by training my senses to perceive the material and immaterial reality in as many different ways as possible, I turn around those filters, opening up a whole new way of experiencing what surrounds me. Sometimes I don’t understand why or how or what is happening at a conscious level but I know that my subconscious is taking care of all that information, giving me the chance to go through them while dreaming or during other peculiar moments of my life.

It’s a spiral.

Tell us about your musical creative process ( from ideation- to production to- music video) etc..

A metaphor might be, a particle of dark matter floating through space and being lured, pushed back, crushed and pulled, from any sort of gravitational field.

My approach to music production is like a box containing a cluster of emotions and feelings melted with my background and experiences. All these energies have to go through a funnel represented by my tools that are few and serve as limitations, as boundaries, that I have to overcome, finding new and creative ways to express my momentary feelings.

Most of my works are related to specific concepts that reflect my personal journey through life and research. I perceive the result as a brick that I put over the previous one with the aim to build a stairway to the known unknown or vice versa.  

Regarding the visual part of my projects, until now I have preferred to collaborate with other artists in order to take my conceptual ideas to another level, sometimes very far from the initial one. I find that collaboration is the most respectful and important way to be aware of one's limitations and to enrich one's work by contaminating, enhancing and interweaving it with the knowledge of others.

How does technology/innovation affect your work and your creativity?

Technology does not always bring a positive contribution to creativity, if I think to all the hours spent troubleshooting softwares, computers and so on instead of just letting myself play and have fun with a certain instrument. But surely it’s something I have to face constantly during my compositional or learning process.

I’m currently focusing on spatial performances and installations as well as ambisonic and binaural recordings that bring a whole new way of approaching music production.

Technology for me represents both: a way of limiting myself through the use of only specific tools but also a way to expand possibilities and to improve by focusing on specific topics.

Would love to hear more about the video direction by chiara de maria. 

Anemos (puff/wind _Greek) is the closing track of my latest album “Little Floating Oracles”.

The 7-tracks album was inspired by the concept of fetus, perceived as a physical incarnation of the cosmic essence which embodies the endless knowledge of an Oracle.

At the beginning of the collaboration with Chiara De Maria, I remember spending hours looking for a place that embodies the sense of stillness and rarefied vastness of the track and we ended up in the northernmost part of Germany, a place with patches of completely white and silver earth overhanging the Baltic Sea. We recorded the video during two dawns. The process of preparing the set the whole night under a full moon watching us and stripping completely naked in the silence before the first rays of Sun, has been as a purifying ritual for me. That moment brought me back to my childhood and even further, brought me even closer to nature and made me experience how fragile we are, as human beings.

The video is visionary drifting of symbolical elements that brings to dialogue two undefinable subjects: the time and the essence of life, like water perceived as mercury, an alchemical element, liquid metal - viscous fluid, dissolving in an almost static atmosphere, a timeless journey between darkness and the first rays of sunrise. 

Chiara De Maria translates this assumption through surreal and dreamlike visions, which interrupt the linear narrative by introducing and interweaving layers not directly related to the perception of the narrative that defines the nativity theme, striving not to define it from an anthropocentric view but opening up to the vastness of universal life in all its many facets and contradictions.