The rush of the morning. Find a seat on the tube, shove your headphones in and listen to ‘Strange Weekend’. People, places rush by and the pace increases with each passing moment. Slowly you disengage, head falling down until…
“I’m not interested in dreams for themselves” explains Mauro Remiddi. “I’m more interested in the moment in the morning when you wake up – there is sometimes those few seconds where you actually don’t remember where you are or even your name or things like that. Your memory shuts down for a second. Moments when you are not asleep but you are not awake either. That fine line! The middle line. That’s what I’m interested in.”
Now recording under the name Porcelain Raft, Mauro Remiddi has enjoyed a lengthy musical adolescence. Travelling around the world, his career has moved from Gypsy folk to classical, all the time refining his own outlook, his own approach. “I think it took a long time for me to find my own voice in a way. Not that I’ve found it. But I think I’m on the right track” he reveals at one point. “It took me a lot of time to discover music, to discover new things. Also, I was so obsessed with recording my own things that rarely I would actually discover things and be this kind of music lover. I’ve always been obsessed with what I’m doing so I would just listen to actually what I was recording and really hone in on it. It took me a long time to discover things which would affect me somehow and develop a sound.”
Travelling to Brooklyn, Mauro Remiddi didn’t know what he would record but he knew that he would record something. Setting up his kit, the musician soon found that his neighbours didn’t quite appreciate an Italian ex-pat finding his musical voice during unsociable hours. “My first songs are very intimate somehow – not because I really wanted it to be like that but because actually I had to be soft. I couldn’t really sing properly – everything was dictated by the room which is exactly the point of what I’m doing. So I thought, let’s not straight away go to a studio let’s make it a little bit more flexible so I can play until late, I can play the guitar and drums really late and nobody will say anything but it’s just me, basically. It was a step forward from the bedroom. This thing with the bedroom – I don’t think it’s like a choice, you work with what you have in front of you.”
Whether chosen or dictated by their surroundings, the results are remarkable. Porcelain Raft’s debut album ‘Strange Weekend’ feels very deliberate, very assured – unlike so many records labelled as ‘dream pop’ this is an idea finding a sound, rather than a sound groping for a reason to exist. Truly deserving of the term ‘dream pop’, Porcelain Raft is literally inspired by dreams, of the passage of the self into the unconscious mind. Ironically, Mauro Remiddi used direct visual references during the writing process, building up each song as a mosaic of pictures. “I’ve always been moved more by images than by sounds, since when I started playing music when I was ten with my piano” he says. “But when I was ten I had this piano which had a panel at the front, so you can see the strings. It was an upright piano so you can see the strings. When I was ten I would play and just look at these strings and see the hammers. It was more like a visual approach to an instrument”.
“When I had my band, it was fun but I stopped it – I wanted to move on. I was kind of feeling empty, I had something in my head but I didn’t know what it was. I searched through these images, these collages and it was like I had lit a fire” he continues. “I started again making music. It helped me to create in my head a sound as if somehow I was having to translate collages into sounds. I would say ‘this image, if this was a script let’s make a soundtrack for it’. All these images I collected, it was like a script for a movie. I was looking at it and creating a soundtrack, a soundscape. It was more to do with sounds, honestly.”
Pure sound, like pure light – filtered, without blemish. At one point Mauro Remiddi compares his music to colour, explaining that he is searching for white tones. “I’ll give you an example: once I went to see an exhibition and I enter in this room and there was like super loud techno music and there was a piece of art. This room was completely white, so there was neon light and everything was super white. There was something there that really struck me, because all of us used to listen to techno music in dark clubs with strobes, everybody fucked up.. dancing.. so it was really weird to hear that music in a space which was antiseptic, white, clean. I thought, this is the context. As soon as you change the context of a music it changes it meaning, it’s landscape and it changes its colour as well. So this white colour is probably something to do with the spaces you are around. Everything you put in this white space becomes a different object. If you look now at the front of your desk there will be so many objects – if you just take one of those, put it in an empty room, completely white that object has another meaning straight away. So when I see white that’s what I see.”
Heavily improvised, ‘Porcelain Raft’ has an unerring fragility. Composed in a spur of the moment rush, Mauro Remiddi faces the unedifying task of attempting to piece the album back together in a live context – something he apparently relishes. “You record these songs – which are not formed, because when I composed them, recorded them, they just came out. They didn’t have time to develop. When do they develop? They develop in the live show” he states. “What you see in the record is just like a snapshot of a moment of the day that song was made. Just that moment. The live shows are like “let’s look at this and let’s play with this and let’s jam with this” – it’s like a work in progress going on between the record and the live shows.”
Unless You Speak From Your Heart from Porcelain Raft on Vimeo.
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‘Strange Weekend’ is out now.
