Eraldo Bernocchi

-Eraldo, what did we hear last night at the bar?

EB: Last night it was an album called “Charged” with Toshinori Kondo, Japanese jazz trumpeter and Bill Laswell on bass. I produced and mixed the album as well as played guitars. I involved Laswell and Kondo after listening to the album Kondo did with DJ Krush and we took it from there. We toured extensively after its release on R&S Records. Also, we planned to record another one. It actually happened but never saw the light due to some technical issues. That record is now some 25 years old, but it's still working, I think!

-Took me a while to find that exact record, if someone would want to go through all your discography, where would they have to look?

EB: Well, I should make a website with a list of all the things I have made, because I have a file with all the releases, but it's endless, there are like hundreds of things. If you go on Spotify under my name, you only find a certain amount of records, those records that got my name in the metadata, but there are other projects like SIMM, for instance, there's no trace of me there or SIGILLUM S, my very first project. It can be difficult for people to find my works because of the metadata tagging. There's a lot of multimedia stuff, too. A lot of music for adverts, music for films, documentaries, museum installations, video installations. I like to work with images a lot, even when I'm not working on music for images.

-So how was it, letting someone else - Rita [Erica Synths resident that works with visuals] do the video background for your performance here, how was the cooperation?

EB: It was very interesting because I usually work with a video artist with whom I have worked together for 30 years, but with Rita it was different because she's young and she's into experimenting. It was different for me. But I think she did really well. Talking about the visual background, something I usually hate is the blinking. That pattern just isn't working with my music - my music is more graphic and it has nothing to do with the VJ world. It's more similar to a painting that slowly comes alive. Usually I use more filmic and cinema oriented images. It's like I am scoring a soundtrack in real time for the images behind me. But in this case, in this residency I think it's more interesting for people to see how artists are working with your machines. But usually, when you go to an electronic music concert images become really important, at the end of the day It's boring to see someone just fiddling around with knobs or another thing - when you see someone that is playing with a with a laptop on stage and you can see the email icon in corner of the screen. I like these machines because they're instruments, you can actually play them like a guitar. The environment here at Erica Synth is very creative. But on the other side, you also need technique and rationality. So what I found very interesting is that there's a big amount of creativity, but also there are people who are realizing those transformations - translating the creativity into something that people can use.

Photo by Linda Dambeniece-Migliniece

What made you get into creating music? When did that happen?

EB: I think emotions. When I was like 12 or 13.

-First heartbreak?

EB: No, no, something way more weird. I stole a book, The Exorcist, from my mum because she didn't want me to read it, she said it's super scary. And I read the book - it was indeed really frightening. Maybe I should have listened to her. But I thought, oh God, I would like to hear a soundtrack for this book - I would like to read it with some music. And I started to think about that. Then I got into rock and metal and punk like most teenagers. And then I went back to electronics and experimenting, sometimes I still play metal, especially slow doom metal. But I went back to experimenting because I fancied the idea of creating soundtracks. It wasn't the desire to become famous or something like that, yet I was playing air guitar in my bedroom and listening to Motorhead, Kiss and Metallica, Slayer, the usual stuff. It was not what I was interested in. I was more interested in experimenting with things - there's been a period in my house where my parents were hiding turntables and cassette players because I was opening them and hacking them, of course, not really knowing what I was doing, I had no clue at all. The main hack was the speed of the motors and changing some resistors so I could distort the output gain. It was like trial and error. That's why they started to hide it - because of the error factor.

I'm dying to know what kind of punk hairstyle you had.

EB: I had short hair, sometimes tiny spikes, but nothing really. I mostly wore a leather jacket and military boots, never did anything weird with the style.

Is there a book you would like to write a soundtrack for?

EB: There is one book that's one of my favorites, It's Les Chants de Maldoror by Isidore Ducasse. It's a surrealistic travel into other dimensions, it had been banned for more than a century, because of the anti-christianity themes, it's a controversial book and if they ever did a film I would love to do a soundtrack for it because there is everything in that book in my sensibility.

What would you consider the core principles or fundamentals of your work? Are there any ongoing patterns or themes that have stayed from the beginning till now?

EB: That must be exploration, different sounds and genres, I don't like to be confined to one thing. Yesterday Girts said that my musical output is so diverse and different, I just can't help it, I can't stand to do one thing - two thirds of my work is collaborations, the remaining third is who I am and what I'm doing for myself. I need to exchange ideas, do things with other artists - I tend to get bored working by myself after a while, because there is no exchange. Sometimes I have a feeling that it's like a mental masturbation - constantly playing with yourself, your ideas, nurturing ideas through yourself. It's not necessarily only in the music field, but also in the image field. I'm working now on a soundtrack for a photography book. It's about being stimulated and exchanging ideas. That's the pattern. I've been told that people can recognize some sort of a trademark in some of my records, like the way I play guitar or the sound I give to my projects. But apart from that, I'm not interested in being in one place, being tied to a certain kind of music. I'm open to pretty much everything as long as it's emotional. That meaning not only a heartbreak - also a wall of noise that is wiping you out could be emotional. And I need to get something out of that. When I was preparing for the performance here, I threw away a lot of stuff that was surfacing but wasn’t really effective. Less is better.

Photo by Linda Dambeniece-Migliniece

Do you have a musical mission?

EB: I actually have no mission, no political mission. I always hated politics linked to music. That's why I was in the punk scene, especially the early punk. That was totally anarchic. I'm happy if people like my music, first of all, but I must be the one to like it. I mostly create music for myself. I do my best not to compromise. Of course, when you get commissions for doing film scores or music or adverts, you have to compromise because there's a client that is asking you for a specific thing. I am mostly called and hired for what I do, for my style. But it can happen that the client is asking some weird things that are not in my book.

What's the weirdest commercial you've done?

EB: In reality they’re all weird in a way or another. From health insurance to cars to cleaning stuff to sodas to mineral water and banks. It's a challenge, mostly because I have never been constrained by time limits in terms of music. My work could be 3 minutes or 3 hours long. So I never cared about time. I only cared about the boredom ratio of one track - you listen to something and you say, “Oh, that's amazing!” But after four minutes it starts to wear out and you are saying okay, now maybe it's time to create a break or fade or throw it away and start again.

I never felt the pressure of time while working on my own music. But in adverts and films they tell you that you have 15 seconds, or the length of a scene, because the TV broadcasting has a huge cost, so you have to make those 15 seconds super interesting, you have to keep the attention of a potential customer. It's challenging. I love it when they give me like nine seconds. Count until nine! For you it is a very short time, but for me, now, after all these years and years I have worked in the field, it has become a decent amount of time to create things. I have learned a lot, I have learned to rationalize what I'm doing. Also on my records, I'm literally throwing away hundreds of tracks, well, not really throwing them away, but, you know, putting them away in a couple of hard disks. Sometimes I dig through it to look for ideas, maybe there's something I can use, maybe like a starting point for an advert.

What's the story of how you got here? What brings an Italian from London to here?

EB: I've been in London now for eight years and I met Ģirts last year through Iggor Cavalera, the drummer from Sepultura, we have a few joint electronic projects. And Ģirts was at the London Synth Expo, where I tried the Pērkons and I fell in love with the machine! I was already owning the Zen Delay as well as the Bassline. Girts said to me, well, if you want it, I could give you this one because I'd rather not go back with an extra weight in my bag. So he gave me that exact machine, we made a deal and started corresponding and eventually I found that the title he has, of being a visionary, is true! I find him a very creative person, but at the same time perfectly focused on what he does, which is a difficult combination - most of the time creative people are not focused at all on the marketing or planning side of things. So we started to exchange ideas, then he asks “Why don't you come for a residency to our studio?” And I said, “Yeah, absolutely! I would love to!”

Photo by Linda Dambeniece-Migliniece

What was your weapon of choice in this studio?

EB: The Pērkons of course, I used it a lot, also the Nightverb for drones and ambience. It was a pleasure to program the factory content patches for it. And the Zen delay is something I'm always going on a stage with. I use the Bassline a lot, but not as a Bassline in the “acid” meaning of it. More as a massive droning thing, because it can be used as a very experimental tool. But of course, if you want to use it as an acid machine it’s easy to do it. Apart from your machines, what I use In the studio is the Elektron Octatrack, I use it a lot. I got two of them. One is boxed - in case one of them dies. And the Korg MS-20, an original one from the end of the 70s, which is perfectly working. Never been serviced once! And then while staying here I started to use a few modules, like the Plasma Drive the Sample Drum. And the two new effects too. On a daily basis I also use a lot of guitars. A good amount of my stuff is done with a guitar, but people can't tell that. I like the fact that you can use a guitar as a sound generator. There's been a period where I wasn't even tuning them. I was just putting them on a table and dropping things on them, reprocessing and then resampling that. And then I went back to playing them, tuning them properly, using them as intended. What I played here at the performance was absolutely created here. I had nothing when I came here, I created everything in real time.

Eraldo Bernocchi (left), Ģirts Ozoliņš (right). Photos by Linda Dambeniece-Migliniece

Did your performance here go as planned and how was it to perform for an almost empty room, just cameras and a few people sitting in a corner?

EB: Everything went as planned, as for the crowd - there is a difference, it takes a little bit more to get into the thing, because you have no audience. It took me maybe 2 or 3 minutes to get into it and I lost myself as usual. I mostly never look at the audience, I'm a shy person. Also when I play guitar, sometimes I play with my back on the audience and facing the drummer. It's like an exchange of dialogue there. For me, ideally, a performance setup would consist of a screen, a giant screen in front of the stage, like a cinema. Me behind it while I'm creating music for images. It's not necessary that you see me, there's nothing to see.

Photo by Linda Dambeniece-Migliniece

Eraldo Bernocchi performs live at Erica Synths Garage -