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Interview with Logoplasm

  Tobias

Hi, how are you? Could you shortly introduce yourselves, please?
Hi! Logoplasm is two individuals, Laura Lovreglio and Paolo Ippoliti and the sound of the days they go through while living. For a long while, the Logoplasm unit had two other members, our dogs, Kira and Lupa. Sadly they are not with us anymore. But you can hear them both all over old releases, their breaths, motions and gestures, tiny fingernails clicking onto floors while walking.

Could you describe when and how Logoplasm was formed. What was your intention with the project?
Ah, at this point in time this is a bit misty - even for us. I’m quite sure it was before the last century ended: We had tape recorders, time was a weight crushing bodies and intentions, everything slipped as we were tossed through a sea of errors and mishappenings. What could we do but keep a log of what was happening? Yes, we could have used plain words, we partially did… but somehow words are filters, markers of one’s own cultural conditioning. In this respect, pure chunks of captured sound might give a more accurate rendering of the moment. Even if, surely enough, the way you end up composing them is a filter in itself.

Where there any musical or artistic activities before Logoplasm started out? Are there any at the moment?
I, Paolo, used to sing: Black Metal formerly, then Hardcore Punk. This is the late 80s we are talking about. For a couple of years I had a performance based Industrial act going. It was a lot of fun. Most of the times, we terrorized unaware audiences with ugly, loud things, unholy screamed spoken words and a leviathan of noise backing it all up. Laura spent all her childhood and most of her teen years living in the countryside, listening to crickets and cicadas, foxes and owls, wind rustling. To the scope of Logoplasm, this is a very relevant portion of musical background, so to speak.

Currently: I have a solo project going, it’s called Boombox Borealis, basically it’s noisy sci-fi epics. I have a cassette out, more will follow hopefully shortly and at a point it is going to end. Also a plethora of yet unnamed projects, but I don’t know how many of those will see the light. Ideas abound, the time needed to develop them isn't, unluckily. And I’m trying to convince Laura to release some of her old and new solo stuff that never saw the light of the day, not even in the usual six/seven copies editions we are known for.

And then we have another project going: It’s not that far from Logoplasm, but there are no field recordings involved, just the tape loops and the drones. The first cassette of the series is being released as we speak. The project name is Forever Idle Forever Idol.

How do you see the relationship between your sound work from a personal and artistic perspective? What I mean is: In which way has your work influenced your life and vice versa?
Our work and our life are the same thing really. You get less whining and less desperation in soundworks and a beautiful time lapse which does not usually gift all of our days. But that’s where the differences end. Where life shifts towards the dark we sit down, cut everything up and make it swim towards the sun. If I had nieces, if I had to play the cranky grandad babbling about the past and amassed experiences, I’d skip all that, close them in a room and play a thousand of our releases for them and that would be it. It’s really all there: the sweats and the doubts, the trembling and joys and the difficulty to bear the everpresent fatigue and toil. Coming all at once, as noisy as it gets.

What are the sources of your inspiration? (unless you answered that already)
I guess everything inspires us. The snippets more than the wholes. Events, as irrelevant as they may be, tend to strike up synaptic chain reactions, that usually sail faraway to unexpected results. And quiet, too, silence.

Your compositions mainly consist of field recordings and concrete noises. By the mere use of these and just a few electronic sounds you create dense and exciting ambiances. How do your pieces take shape in practise?
At some point in any of our days, a device is recording. Tape walkmans, minidiscs, dictaphones. We used to keep a chronologically ordered archive, but the order got swallowed by a shoggoth, and all we are left with is a mess of unlabelled cassettes, discs, soundfiles. Whenever we feel the urge to compose something, we just pick at random and start scouting for resonances, similarities, shadows and ghosts. The meaning usually blossoms later, even months later. Background areas of the brain do all the dirty work. We are privy to their modus operandi only after long while. It has a lot to do with automatic writing maybe. Or the hallucinatory puzzle nature of the universe.

What are the tools and sources of your work and what are your criteria for choosing them?
I’m afraid that the only criteria is poverty. Our equipment is overall crappy, malfunctioning, completely unreliable, coarsed and cursed by time and heavy usage. Our mixer is a birthday present, pedals and microphones are borrowed, laptops are paid for monthly, everything else is cheap, made in Taiwan and bought at flea markets and it will stop working when it’s most needed. I’d use the best equipment around if I could, obviously. But we live in a slum, paying for it day by day via underpaid jobs, and priorities are completely elsewhere, unluckily.

What constitutes a good live performance in your opinion? What’s your approach to performing on stage?
The sole mission we stick to when playing live is temporal distortion and sensory saturation. We are not there to display any particular ability or coolness or impressing gestures. In a way, it has nothing to do with the whole neo-improv thing where everybody is up dancing their little dances over a full table. We are usually very still as in concentration, hunting the sounds as they come through the speakers. We chat constantly, usually have a lot of fun. We go and build a cage, trapping the audience in our days and memories. Confusion ensues. At times the effect is almost psychedelic. And the louder the better.

How would you describe the audience reaction and the general response to your music?
Whenever we stop, there are some seconds of complete silence and stillness and you can usually not hear a single breath. It’s difficult to get out of our spaceship. Oh, then there’s clapping, sure. And three or four strangers reporting the most curious experience they had. Temporal distortion mostly, as hinted above.

What are your future plans for Logoplasm?
We just launched an archival label called Kosmik Elk Mind. It has nothing to do with s’agita recordings. We set it up just to have something to write on the back of our almost private editions. Hopefully through that, a load of old and new work that we had buried somewhere will see the light. And should we be successful in performing the trick that would change the wind on our life sails we will probably play around a lot more often.

By Marcus Obst

Discography:
Limpida Caostella Del Mattino (self-released) 2000
Fungoe 06-09 (Tiln) 2001
La Musica Che Finisce Per Sempre (self-released) 2001
Sublime.Caos.Nel.Cuore (S'agita) 2002
Un Libro Scritto In Automatico Che Il Cuore Non Comprende (self-released) 2002
Kalm (self-released) 2003
Live In Rome (Ctrl+Alt+Canc) 2003
Gravescapes (Afe)  2006
Attimo In Un Wormhole (Ctrl+Alt+Canc) 2007
Fortean Boomerangs (Kosmik Elk Mind) 2007
Testa Piena D'Orche (Afe) 2007
Transito Dal Leggiadro (Kosmik Elk Mind) 2007
Drunk Upon Thy Holy Mountain (Setola Di Maiale) 2008
Kane-I-Kokala (Field Muzick) 2008
Orche Nella Jungla (Kosmik Elk Mind) 2008

Homepage:
Logoplasm
Logoplasm at MySpace