SKY ON THE GROUND

→ VINYL, CD, CASSETTE, and DL/STREAMING – out October 17, 2025 (SCROLL DOWN FOR ORDER LINKS)

After my earlier collaboration with Stefano Castagna, Sea of Hopeless Angels, which I consider a deeply successful artistic statement, we wanted to create a follow-up that would feel different yet still carry our shared identity. On Sea of Hopeless Angels, Stefano used his production and arrangement magic to build pieces around my live improvisations — that album is purely instrumental, and I remain very proud of it.

For Sky on the Ground, we wanted to preserve that creative chemistry but take it somewhere new. This time, I began by going through my personal recording archives — spanning almost thirty years, from as early as 1998 to this year — and selected performances that had remained unused but still resonated with me. I sent them to Stefano, who at first didn’t quite know what to do with them and was rather skeptical. But only a few days later, he surprised me with a beautiful sketch: he had combined my recordings with his bass, programming, and keyboards, and the result immediately showed promise.

I remember one particular soundscape that I had originally created during an improvisation with Berlin-based drummer Merlin Ettore. I isolated just my soundscape from that session and listened to it one night while I was very sick, lying in bed. Suddenly, I heard a melody emerging from the texture — something that wanted to come out. I hummed the melody, wrote down a few words, and recorded a rough vocal demo straight into my laptop microphone. That moment sparked the decision for both Stefano and me to include vocals on the album — not in a traditional “singer-songwriter” sense, but as expressive, processed voices shaped by vocoders and Auto-Tune.

Adding lyrics and voice turned out to be a wonderful decision. It gave the music a fresh sense of energy and light. Compared to my other projects, Sky on the Ground is harmonically more direct and uplifting — even “happy” at times — while still being compositionally intricate. Some of the vocal pieces have quite complex rhythmic structures and harmonic turns, but the songs were all built around the words, rather than the other way around.

The album also includes purely instrumental pieces, some based on archival material, others on new recordings I made specifically for this project. In addition to my usual electronic textures, I played harmonium, glockenspiel, and even acoustic guitars — both nylon- and steel-string. These acoustic layers added warmth and helped shape the album’s distinctive sound world.

Listening to the finished record, I often forget that I’m one of its creators — it feels like something that simply exists, which is always the best sign. For me, Sky on the Ground has been one of the musical highlights of my year.

We’re releasing it on vinyl, CD, and cassette, all available via Bandcamp.

When Stefano and I met earlier this year to mix the album, I was sick again — bedridden for two of our four studio days — and I think that combination of struggle and focus contributed to the emotional clarity and intensity of the final result.

Early on, Stefano mentioned My Life in the Bush of Ghosts as an inspiration, while I thought of Brian Eno’s Another Day on Earth. Both of those records explore the human voice in an abstract, processed way — and that resonated deeply with our approach. The guiding idea for this project, which we started in September 2024, was magical realism: to create a sonic equivalent of that aesthetic found in literature and film — where the extraordinary and the ordinary coexist seamlessly.

I hope when you listen, you can feel some of that magic. Thank you for listening — and for being part of this journey.