TOMAT rolls the dice
Photo by Camilla Soave
Davide Tomat (aka Tomat) is a producer and sound designer from Turin focused on space drone ambient sounds, psychedelic electronic music and crooked rhythms. Co-founder of Superbudda (Creative Collective) he has released records with the Tomat Petrella duo on the Berlin label !K7 Records, with the SPIME.IM a/v project on the Zurich label OUS Records, with the Niagara band on the London label Monotreme Records, and Tomat records on 7K! Records.
Interview by Interlocutor Magazine
Your new EP Diistemi was conceived and produced during the first pandemic lockdown, between March and May 2020. You’ve described it as a “collection of images and sounds” you were feeling at the time. In what ways do you feel these compositions are different from what you've produced before? How did the lockdown influence your writing?
I'm used to taking personal “stops” from the usual routine of life. Generally, before starting to work on a new project I tend to carve out some time to concentrate on that particular project.
It’s happened to me several times. I move to another city for a while and I book a certain window of time for myself without outside distractions, but it's always a personal decision.
With the first lockdown that decision to “stop” was obliged, and even if I'm used to personal “lockdowns” the difference is that usually personal withdrawals don’t coincide with other people's retirement, and most of all, they don’t coincide with a world pandemic. Instead of waiting to understand what was happening worldwide and instead of facing my unavoidable trauma, I started working on some new material.
After my first solo release in 2012, I needed a long time to work properly on some new solo material, but I've been involved in many [other] projects. So I took the first lockdown as a moment to concentrate and work seriously on some personal material. But that wasn’t easy. It was tough. Infections and deaths were declared [like] lottery numbers every day from the media. The situation was becoming more and more unclear and frightening every day, and even if I didn't experience illness myself or with my family, I experienced the sickness and the loss of loved ones.
So after a very confused beginning, in which I tried to do music in my usual way, finding myself more unsatisfied, doubtful, and uncomfortable than ever, I was forced to totally change my approach to it. What I had to do was find a way to recover from that shock and that situation.
I started eating lots of peanut butter, watching [TV] series and films I always wanted to watch, reading and finishing books I had on my night table for ages and slowly I remembered music has always been my strongest [means of] recovery, so I started producing only for the pleasure to do music [and] forgetting any other practical aspect of it.
I connected all the synthesizers and modules I had at home to my computer and started working MIDI-based, monitoring external hardwares without recording any audio till the end of the process, writing and programming MIDI notes, MIDI events and MIDI automations to feed all the external modules to create sounds that were morphing organically during [this] duration, starting from m4l patches to control all the synthesizers at one time, with several different MIDI notes mapping, avoiding traditional composition and concentrating on [hearing].
Every day I was putting out only sounds and textures that really satisfied my ears and my body without judging them, relating to the feeling of the day, and recording the complete score only when it was really convincing me. After that I [moved] to something new without [looking back].
When the first lockdown finished in May [2020], I left all this “collection of images and sounds” in my hard drive and forgot about them until early 2021, when I decided to send them to my mixing buddy Maurizio Borgna and to my friend Carlo Garrè from 7K. They both told me to release it!
John Cage’s book Silence helped to push you out of an initial creative block with Diistemi. In what specific ways did Cage's writing help motivate you to take a new approach to composition? Had you read the book before or was it a new discovery?
Silence was one of the books I had on my night table, [I had] started it but never finished. During the lockdown I took it back [and read it] from the beginning, and that was really challenging.
Cage is one of the most incredible 20th century figures we experienced, his vision is still not absorbed and digested at all. I came into contact with his prepared piano works first a long time ago and then I listened to several of his works, but during the lockdown I rediscovered his thoughts, which were very pure, powerful, simple, authentic and concrete, enough to give me back the curiosity of the unknown even in that crazy time.
During a pandemic, all your certainties fall apart, and you realize that what society schedules for the future doesn’t work anymore and the belief in control of the future crumbles. I started accepting that what we have is only the present, that single moment, and [those] thoughts fed my curiosity for the unknown.
That concept really fits with the sound vision of John Cage, his interest for the sound himself, for his peculiar and spontaneous characteristics, untied from a superior role or a superior organization. The joy of hearing that particular sound gave him the legitimacy to exist and manifest.
For the compositions that became Diistemi, you started using dice and probability lists to choose notes, chords, and harmonies. Have you ever tried this approach before or was it uncharted territory for you? What were some good surprises and also some unique challenges with this technique?
What I love most in music and art in general is the error, the repetition of the error, the incorrect things that makes you think, that instinctive and inexplicable thing, those unexpected elements that raise questions and maybe give incomplete and different answers depending on time, place, and audience.
Using modular tools, m4l patches or new devices like Remidi (a wearable controller we use with the spime.im av project) you become used to relying on and dealing with probability tools, random algorithms and with the uncertain – but what was totally new this time to me was to use paper, dice, books, and pencils to do that.
Thanks to the John Cage Silence book, I found myself throwing dice with numbers connected to chords written on paper or pointing a pen over a grid with numbers with closed eyes, like when I was young, and I played with games books. That approach helped me on fixing some harmony movements, beats durations or divisions, patterns, and sequence development in parts where I was stuck.
[Doing this] outside of the musical instrument tools setup, was much, much stronger.
The word “diistemi” is an ancient Greek verb that means “to place separately, to put asunder, to disjoin.” How did you come across this word and why do you think it’s a fitting title for your new EP?
It took me a long time to reach the right name, but now I'm very comfortable with it because it really fits the album. My mood during the three months at home was [like that of] someone who tries to reach the world outside from locked door.
No ways to go out to meet friends, no ways for a night walk, no ways for a morning coffee, no ways to share thoughts and emotions apart through a screen.
This summer, one night I was preparing the preview of a theatre piece with the director Filippo Andreatta and the assistant director Veronica Franchi while we were chatting about my album. Filippo, who's got an amazing “diastema” in his mouth, jokingly suggested that I title the album that. I suddenly found that word amazing, even if at the moment I was in the “acronym” or “date-title-type” mood. The word diastema brought me to that perfect disjoined feeling I experienced during the pandemic time. It was also the perfect disjoined image of that feeling, meaning “temporary cessation of sedimentation” in geology.
Last but not least, that image was also fitting very well with the cover Camilla [Soave] and Francesco [Serasso] were working on. It was perfect both visually and for the meaning but unfortunately not sonically, until Veronica pulled out the “diistemi” word after some wine glasses and that was it.
How did Camilla and Francesco become involved in the album artwork and in what ways did you work with them in conceptualizing the imagery for the cover?
Camilla is my partner in life, and for sure a consistent recovery element during lockdown at home. She did some videos for some of my tracks in the past and I did music for some of her dance pieces, so we share thoughts and ideas.
She knew very well my process with the album and so it was very natural to ask her to work on the cover. She started to work on some images. She took some photos and started editing them on her iPad. One day I saw what she was working on – that greenwood picture distorted in the middle, with that pink/yellow color behind. I saw a river of positive light gushing out from the mountain, heat melting with a defaced nature. At the same time I found two elements that reminded me of Gustavo Rol – a very famous past medium from Turin – the green color and the heat element. Together with the fifth interval, [which] I used a lot in the album, these are three fundamental elements for transcendence for Gustavo Rol.
That was the cover for me, a disjointed and corrupted nature with a hot stream of human hope in the middle.
But for Camilla it was too rough, so we asked Francesco, a designer friend who worked on most of my [other] album covers, to put his hands on it. He brought the plastic over the forest, and it was perfect. Organic and rubbery, natural, and synthetic, rough and defined, hot and cold at the same time, like the sound I tried to reach.
Do you have any planned performances or events in the works to support the release of Diistemi in the near future, either virtually or live?
Yes sure, I’ll definitely bring Diistemi live, almost very soon. I’m working these days on [ways] to bring it alive, thinking about both the instrument setup and the lighting [assets]. Some gigs are coming, and I'll announce them as soon as possible.
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