Mathematical proportions guide compositions on the 2025 album from Die Schachtel

Transmission 170: Interview with Stefano Pilia

Stefano Pilia is an Italian guitarist, composer, and producer based in Bologna. His work treats sound as a physical entity, investigating its relationship with space, memory, and the perception of time through instrumental techniques and studio experimentation.

Title: Lacinia
Artist: Stefano Pilia
Release Date: 2025-02-25
Genres: Avant-garde, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music
Label: Die Schachtel
Description: Stefano Pilia’s album Lacinia (Feb 2025, Die Schachtel & SZ Sugar) explores fractal geometry and recursive patterns through experimental compositions.

Pilia co-founded the electroacoustic experimental project 3/4HadBeenEliminated with Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti. He also collaborates with ensembles such as the psychedelic quartet In Zaire, Il Sogno del Marinaio (with Mike Watt of Minutemen), and Spiralis Aurea, alongside Alessandra Novaga, Adrian Utley (Portishead), Giuseppe Franchellucci, and Mattia Cipolli. He has been the guitarist for Malian singer Rokia Traorè since 2012 and performed with Italian bands Massimo Volume (2008–2016) and Afterhours (since 2015).

His discography includes over forty releases on labels like Die Schachtel, Black Truffle, Maple Death, Improved, and Blue Chopsticks, featuring collaborations with Phill Niblock, David Grubbs, Zu, John Parish, Oren Ambarchi, and David Tibet. Pilia regularly composes and performs live scores for silent films in collaboration with Bologna’s Cinema Ritrovato.

His latest album, Lacinia, released in February 2025 via Die Schachtel and SZ Sugar, expands on his interests in fractal geometry and recursive musical structures, further developing ideas previously introduced on Spiralis Aurea, which centered on the Fibonacci sequence and golden spiral proportions.

What first sparked your fascination with sound and composition? Was there a specific moment or record that changed everything for you?

I remember at the age of 11, some r’n’r [rock’n’roll] and punk mixtape from friends at school totally blew me away, both my head and heart. I got a bass guitar almost immediately and started learning John Paul Jones and Steve Harris bass lines. Before that moment music was not on my radar, except for some Franco Battiato songs. Growing up then, the discovery of an alternative underground scene was truly inspiring, from bands like Slint and Gastr del Sol to composers like Phill Niblock, Tony Conrad, and La Monte Young. Actually in retrospect I discovered a lot of music from the past through the prism of these influences. 

How did you transition from discovering music to actively creating it? What was the first step in that process?

I think a very important gateway was with the act of recording and really digging into that as a creative act and process. Immediately compositions and sound production became the strongest focus for me, with a sort of convergence of these two aspects.

What were the challenges of navigating the experimental music scene when you started? Was there a sense of community, or did you feel like you had to carve out your own space?

I can’t tell if there was a real community around experimental music here in Italy. I think there were a few people and artists committed in that sense and that started to occasionally create connections. There was more of a community around bands, groups and social scenes. Then these two ‘milieus’ started to connect together more and to share spaces and situations. 

Were there any mentors or collaborators early on who helped shape your approach to composition?

Mmm, well firstly listening to records a lot, made by particular artists; these were my first mentors. All the work completed and time spent with my 3/4HadBeenElminated pals Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti definitely shaped my process and approach too. I also studied classical double bass and electroacoustic music with Francesco Giomi and Lelio Camilleri at the conservatory of Bologna alongside physics at university. So I think these experiences also shaped my approach to composition.

The Italian experimental scene has always been rich yet somewhat under the radar compared to other countries. How did the atmosphere of the early 2000s influence your creative path?

As I said, I don’t think there was a concrete idea of a community, even if I agree with you. For a long time there has always been a very interesting Italian experimental scene. It has always been a bit frustrating because in order to get some recognition you often have to move out of this country. If I think about internationally renowned Italian artists today, they all live in other countries and moved away from Italy years back. Some places are definitely privileged for many reasons but there must also be some prejudice too I suspect. In the early 2000s in Bologna we had a place called Link where you might find yourself at a Dean Roberts & Kevin Drumm gig, or an eight hour all night long Sinistri Starfuckers set, or a Dirty Three or Shellac concert, or a Jeff Mills DJ set / techno party, and sometimes some of these events just in one night! Then xm24 was another special place…this miscellany of music was very interesting and inspiring. All these spaces no longer exist though unfortunately. I think Bologna is still a good town to live and create art in. It’s not inspiring like it was in the early 2000s, but I think this sense of degeneration has happened across many cities in the Western World. 

Was there a particular performance or event from your early years that left a lasting impact on your artistic direction?

A couple I just mentioned – Dean Roberts & Kevin Drumm, Sinistri Starfuckers – I also remember an astonishing Phill Niblock gig in the early 2000s. Another great one I remember was Charlemagne Palestine playing the organ at San Martino church. Cellule D’intervention Metamkine in Friuli [North East Italy] at an Agritourism farm called Colonos near Udine…magnificent. A Lightning Bolt gig at TPO was also quite incredible! I saw many things I still remember as inspiring not just one in particular.

Your work often engages with mathematical structures, metaphysical ideas, and tonal architectures. When did this approach start taking shape in your compositions?

At a certain point while playing the guitar I noticed that I was intuitively trying to play – and even dreaming of – symmetric form proportions and looking more and more for strategies concerning symmetric properties. So my poetic interest in these forms gradually became more extensive and profound. In 2018 Die-Schachtel released a record of mine titled ‘In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni’, which is a palindromic sentence and is a collection of pieces around these kinds of themes. In order to continue expanding these ideas I found the guitar too constrictive and definitely not very intuitive for this kind of work. It needed to be done with no instrument in my hand at first. So I started to work more and more with notation. That’s also the reason why it became more natural and easier to involve other musicians in realizing this music and to make the compositional process progressively more coherent.

Over the years, you’ve collaborated with a wide range of artists, from David Tibet to Mike Watt. How do you decide which collaborations align with your vision?

They don’t necessarily have to be strictly aligned with my vision. I think more in general I collaborate with an artist I like the work of, who are essentially nice people.

In my collaboration with David Tibet I was invited by Massimo Pupillo to contribute to the ZU93 project. 

Mike is a longer story. Il Sogno del Marinaio started in 2009! In 2005 I was helping on the road with him for his second opera, together with Raul Morales and Paul Roessler. He has felt so familiar from the very first moment. Then I was offered to present a new project for a festival here in Italy organized by Arci Emilia Romagna. That’s how it started. Since then we’ve made three records and three seven inches and have embarked on several tours all over Europe and the USA. So it’s not only about decision making it’s also about meeting people and seeing how that goes. 

‘Lacinia’ builds on the ideas from ‘Spiralis Aurea’ but takes them further. What was the central concept driving this new work?

It’s about fractal forms and other principles of auto similarities and recursivity. This formal aspect is also present through the sequence order of the single compositions while ‘Spiralis Aurea’ is more a collection of pieces built around the Fibonacci sequence and the proportions of the golden spiral. The golden spiral is still present in some ‘Lacinia’ pieces but it is not the only mathematical proportion I followed to generate the musical form here. The two pieces ‘Lacinia Off Axis’ and ‘Lacinia in Axis’ for example are based on the Koch lace curve, the first fractal form ever “discovered” and one that take its name from the Swedish mathematician who defined it. 

The album’s structure suggests a circular, ritualistic concept of time. Is this a theme you plan to continue exploring in future works?

I think so, I like this conceptual idea of a temporal space which exists outside of linear time, and more in general I am interested in formal aspects which focus on contemplating the infinite through the finite. This Simone Weil quote about Plato seems to hold some relevance here: “the knowledge of everything implies well-defined forms and numbers and an indefinite variety. Nature, as man thinks of it, is a fabric of the finite and the indefinite, in which we must grasp the indefinite through the finite. The continuous series allows us to grasp the infinite through the finite (series of integers). Identity in variety has the value of harmony between spirit and nature.”

With ‘Lacinia’ set for release soon, what’s next for you beyond this cycle of compositions? Are there other projects already in motion?

I have some gigs and more music to do with Sulla Lingua – a trio with Anthony Pateras and Riccardo La Foresta – as well as a quartet called LOLO comprising two African musicians Mamah Diabatè and Jabel Kanuteh and the Italian musician Marco Zanotti. I’ll also be busy working with an Italian theatre production of ‘Lazarus’, a musical written by David Bowie and Enda Walsh. And I have a residency at Motalvo Arts Center in California where I aim to continue expanding my compositional processes and ideas.

Photos courtesy of Stefano Pilia

Matteo Damiani

Matteo Damiani is an Italian photographer and author. Curator of the sites Retrofuturista.com; weirditaly.com; china-underground.com and others