Interview: Chelidon Frame

Chelidon Frame approaches ambient music as a form of resistance: a space for experimentation, storytelling, and instinctive sound-making outside the pressure of algorithms and industry templates. Working with field recordings, synths, tape loops, found objects, and a hybrid setup shaped by both software and hardware, the Milan-based artist builds music through accumulation, limitation, and chance. In this interview, he reflects on the thin line between rarefied and compelling sound, the ethics of streaming and AI, and why the best creative moments happen when time disappears.

General info

Artist Name: Chelidon Frame

Age: 36

Location: Milan, Italy

How long have you been making music? I started learning to play guitar back in 2000, but I had my first experience in the experimental electronic field in 2013.

 

Social Media / Music Links

instagram.com/chelidonframe
facebook.com/ChelidonFrame
youtube.com/chelidonframe
patreon.com/ChelidonFrame

 

Do you release music under a label or independently?

Independent

 

Creative process and inspiration

What drew you to ambient music in the first place?

My starting point with ambient music was actually a technical necessity. I was recording my first solo album as a guitarist, and I wanted to expand my sound palette with more spacey, ethereal sounds to move beyond the usual guitar-bass-drum combination. This was 2008, and I had never played a synthesizer before, nor had any idea about how to work with them. I started experimenting with sounds, parameters, and VSTs, and I liked them so much that when I finished recording the album, I began to work on some primordial soundscapes, inspired by the likes of Sunn O))) and Brian Eno, just to mention the extreme cases: I was also playing with a post-rock band back then, and we were all about noise music, soundscapes, textures and ethereal atmospheres.

Can you describe your creative process when starting a new track?

I rarely sit down and start on a track. My work proceeds by accumulation, gathering raw and processed material. This can involve everything from making field recordings, exploring synth patches, recording drones and effects combinations, and whatever comes to mind; this builds up a library that's both physical - with actual recorded sounds - and mental, making me more elastic and reactive when I combine stuff. Sometimes one of the items in this library sparks things off, and I start assembling, connecting, and merging sound materials: this can end up as a finished track at some point, or as a kind of sound object that will find a place in another composition, and so on.

During certain periods, this process is somewhat connected by a broader sense of inspiration and exploration. For example, for my latest release, “Like Train Whistles”, I was exploring a lot of both analog synth textures and field recordings, and this outlined the idea of recording something related to a trip to Finland I made a couple of years before.

What kinds of experiences or environments tend to inspire your work most?

One of the most inspiring things when it comes to making music is not actually making music. I tend to avoid the idea of inspiration coming from a void and instead grow fertile soil by watching movies, reading, going to a museum, or going for a walk in the park. This somehow activates the right paths in my brain.

On the technical side, I tend to be fascinated by sounds, and every time I encounter an interesting one, I usually record it. I also enjoy seeing what other practitioners in other art fields do with their material, and try to translate it into my sound experiments: from film editing to seeing a collage artist at work, everything is inspiring.

What atmosphere or emotional space are you trying to create with your music?

This could vary, and it's probably the emotive side of my work when it comes to recording music. I'm not able to detach from myself and what I'm feeling in the moment, and in mysterious ways, this dictates how I choose and direct things. It's not a conscious procedure; I'm in the flow, and when the music is out in the wild, everything mixes up.

What moment made you feel like you had truly found your sound?

There was this experiment I made back in 2020, “Road To Nowhere”. It was a YouTube thing where I decided to film the recording process of a series of tracks with a limited set of choices available: just use one synth and one effect, use tape loops, do everything in two hours or less, and record everything in one take. I ended up with six tracks that I still enjoy today, and they passed the test of time.

youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOJiwHZXoCb-hhwlFJMfeCFHjQPAQ3MO-

How important is storytelling in your work?

Storytelling is the most important thing. Not in the way that every track must recount a story or have a reference in the real world, but I work a lot on structuring the tracks, making them follow a sort of narrative, with climaxes, pauses, build-ups, dialogues…

It's not a structure defined a priori; most of the time spawns and reveals itself while the track is composed and recorded, just how a tree grows, with each branch connected to a previous one, but following its own path onwards: sometimes a sounds or a particular movement in a field recording suggest another sound, that is connected to the whole structure, but reveals a small structure for itself. And this emerges in live settings too, where most of my sets are improvised - both alone and in small ensembles - and every gesture, phrase, or sound choice can spawn and make flourish new ideas.

One of my past releases, “A Desert Displays”, is titled after a quote from a poem by Keith Waldorp, “Each grain of sand has its architecture, but a desert displays the structure of the wind”, and I think that this describes in a better way what I'm trying to explain.

What makes a track feel “finished” to you?

I think it's more a feeling rather than an actual decision. It comes at a moment when I feel or understand that the track is done; it's saying everything that I need it to say. Sometimes it comes after hours and hours of small refinements, practically by exhaustion; othertimes is when you click stop after an improvised recording: everything worked flawlessly, even the small errors or glitches are part of the composition, and you just need to mix and master the thing.

Which artists (or even non-musical influences) have shaped your artistic vision?

A lot of them, from Sunn O))) to Kraftwerk, from Miles Davis to the small jazz combo I happen to hear in a pub, from Ryosuke Kiyasu playing in a basement in a squat to the droning sounds of cars in the outskirts of the city. I'm an avid listener of free jazz and experimental music, and this ends up being a source of inspiration.

 

Gear and setup

Are you using hardware instruments, software, or a hybrid setup?

I'm using an hybrid setup, with both hardware and software synths, Casio keyboards, modular synths, guitars, found objects: everything that can make a sound!

What's your favorite piece of gear or plugin, and why?

It is definitely the Make Noise 0-Coast. I got it around 2015, and since then, I have used it in almost every live set I have played. It's the perfect live tool: every knob does something different, every small movement changes the sound, and it's the perfect companion for harsh drones or improvised moments.

What piece of gear completely changed your workflow?

It's probably moving definitely from Logic Pro to Ableton Live: that sped up my workflow and made playing live a direct consequence of the studio work, and vice versa. Also, getting a patchbay and having half of my hardware instruments always connected, and the other half a cable plug away from being connected: I hate friction when it comes to making music, I need everything a at hand.

 

Challenges

What's been the biggest challenge so far in creating ambient music?

For me, it's finding the sweet spot between the music being rarefied and still being somehow interesting, without being too outspoken. Take “Music For Airports”, the original sin for all ambient musicians: It's incredibly uninteresting, a tapestry of sound - following what Brian Eno said - that reveals an incredible complexity, “as ignorable as it is interesting”. That sweet spot is hard to find, is the perfect balance of everything, from sound to texture choices, from silence to orchestration.

Also being effective in short durations: I love myself a long epic track, but sometimes being effective under six or seven minutes is an interesting challenge.

How do you stay motivated or inspired when you're in a creative rut?

I don't! I try to live my life and ignore the elephant in the room. I had my periods in a creative ruts in more than ten years working with the Chelidn Frame project, and in the end all the good suggestions - change routines, organize tasks, feed youtself on external input - and the bad ones, didn't work. The solution for me is to accommodate the moment; it will dissolve sooner or later.

But a creative rut doesn't work well with deadlines, does it? I have a system of things that I can do without being the best version of myself: those are some kinds of recipes that quickly help me develop a soundscape or outline a track. This is something that functions as a life jacket when you have work to do!

How do streaming platforms affect the way you release music, or what is your relationship with those platforms?

They don't, actually. I don't compose music to end up in a bot-driven playlist just to make some big numbers and showcase a pre-made medal every year And I could not care less about listeners' numbers there, because people are forced to live their music experience only on the app, and the tech overlords there are not interested in curious listeners, that explore things outside of the plaftorm, and make it almost impossible for them.

It's an ethical minefield. I hate how commodification has ended up zeroing out the income for small to medium artists, while they drive traffic and users to the platform too. I also hate how we all - from Taylor Swift to Merzbow - have to play in the same league: it's like having the parish football team playing against Real Madrid every day. The onse size fits all model is harful for - guess who? - small and independent artists. And somehow, at some point we all agreed on that, and when it was evident that things were going sideways, we were too deep in this corporate mud to be able to move out of it.

What are your thoughts on AI's impact on music and art? Have you, in any form, used it in your approach to creating and shaping ideas?

Apart from being a musician, I'm also a freelance software developer, and AI has been the buzzword for the last 2/3 years, and I don't feel good about it. There's a lot of fog, pumped-up numbers, and hyperbolic descriptions that make even forming an idea very difficult. We need to make a distinction between generative AI and other AIs.

When it comes to expressing yourself, I don't see how a machine making your work will end up really doing that. It's the errors, your different understanding of things, the way your hands are shaped, even what you eat that day, that inform you on how to make things: how can a prompt that fires up a stochastic parrot built on stolen material enhance that? And you can say that can be a great help for people with disability, and I can vaguely agree with that, but is this the way it's sold? Or it's sold as a magic box that will write your next tought?

We have a technology that can probably be helpful in finding a cure for cancer, and we're using it for what? To make fake images and to write emails? And in the meantime, they're training war machines with our day-to-day usage.

The discourse is complex; I don't want to dive deep in this interview. I'm still reading a lot of stuff on the theme, but again, I don't feel good about it. And no, I won't use it in my creative process.

How do you see AI evolving in music and art? Are you cautious about it, or do you think it will increasingly function as a tool within creative workflows?

This is a question that will have questions as answers!

I think generative AI will swallow up most of the market, namely Spotify. We already have top-ten music that's AI-generated, and listeners won't notice it. Will they notice in the future? When all the music and lyrics come from a robot, will they still be relevant? Are people willing to go to see robot concerts?

Probably yes, but because music has become mostly a background experience - a playlist to put on when you're doing something else - or event-driven experiences - you have to be at the event, not at the concert. But we as humans need real connections, real experience, and this thing is like a ticking bomb. We will end up with people getting tired and needing something like the punk of the 70s, the old-school rap, the Kosmische Musik in the second post-war period, or the noise scene. A sound revolution? A caustic fire that will raze part of the industry to the ground?

Again, the discourse is complex, and I have more questions than answers!

What are you currently working on?

Actually, nothing! I have some ideas and things moving for the next year, but I'm not focusing on anything precisely, and this is so refreshing!

What advice would you give to new ambient artists?

Make the music you love, fuck everything else. It's a form of resistance. If you turn on your synth at 2PM and ten minutes after it's 8PM and you wonder where the time has gone, you're doing the right thing. Also, play with other musicians, collaborate, and. play live music.

 

The sound of Chelidon Frame