Interview: Luca Longobardi

General info

Artist Name: Luca Longobardi

Real name: Luca Longobardi

Age: 50

Location: Rome, Italy

How long have you been making music? Since I was four.

Social Media / Music Links

instagram.com/luca_longobardi_

Do you release music under a label or independently?

Independent

Creative process and inspiration

What drew you to ambient music in the first place?

I think it was less a conscious decision to make ambient music and more a gradual consequence of the way I started listening to sound. I come from a classical background, and for many years the piano taught me to think in terms of structure, interpretation and, above all, control. Electronic music opened a completely different door. I became increasingly interested in what happens between events: resonance, decay, repetition, noise, silence, and the way a sound changes simply because you allow it to exist for longer.

Ambient music gave me permission to treat time differently. A sound doesn't necessarily have to lead somewhere. It can simply inhabit a space. That idea became increasingly important to me, especially once my work started moving beyond concert music into installations, immersive environments and multimedia projects. At some point, I realised that I was no longer composing only notes. I was composing time, space and the conditions in which listening happens.

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

I usually start with an image, a physical gesture, a sound or sometimes a very simple conceptual idea. From there, I try to build a situation rather than a composition.

Over the years, I've actually become interested in reducing my control over that situation. My classical training gave me a very strong relationship with precision, while electronic instruments allowed me to introduce instability. I often work with systems that are not completely synchronised, with experimental UI instruments and generative processes. I like creating a set of conditions and then listening to what the instruments suggest back to me.

When something unexpected happens, I then try to understand whether it is just an accident or whether it contains the identity of the piece. I record a lot, sometimes for a long time, and then the actual composition emerges through selection, subtraction and layering.

The piano often comes later. It becomes another object inside that environment rather than automatically being the centre of it.

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

Places have always been extremely important to me, particularly spaces that carry traces of what happened there before. Those traces become part of the composition.

I'm fascinated by the idea that a place can retain memory without explicitly telling a story. This is probably why absence appears so often in my work. What is no longer there can sometimes be more powerful than what is present.

Aqua Tacita, my latest release, began with my research into the ritual abandonment of wells. I became fascinated by the well not simply as an architectural object, but as a symbolic space connecting human beings to water, necessity, ritual and memory. Eventually, I started imagining the same landscape in a future in which water was no longer there. The entire album grew out of that transition from presence to absence.

I think this relationship between physical space, memory and transformation is probably one of the most consistent threads running through my work.

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

I'm not sure I want to prescribe a specific emotion. I'm much more interested in creating a condition in which the listener becomes aware of their own perception.

Time is central to this. I like music that changes slowly enough that you begin to notice details you would normally ignore: a mechanical sound from the piano, a texture moving almost imperceptibly, or a repetition that gradually stops feeling like repetition.

There is often melancholy in what I do, but I don't think melancholy is the objective. I'm looking for a kind of suspended space between familiarity and estrangement, presence and absence: something that feels recognisable but cannot be completely located.

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

There wasn't a single moment, and I'm slightly suspicious of the idea of “finding your sound” because it suggests arriving somewhere and staying there. That said, there is a particular combination of sounds that I feel deeply attached to: my upright piano together with the Strymon BigSky. The first time I put those two instruments together, I felt that I resonated with them in a very immediate way. They created a kind of safe place, a familiar ground from which I could experiment and move freely towards distant shores.

That sense of familiarity is important to me because it gives me the freedom to explore. I love new instruments, too. I enjoy investigating them, reading the manuals, studying their possibilities and discovering over time what they can reveal. But whenever I think I have found the ideal sound, I remind myself, borrowing a famous phrase from Game of Thrones: “Not today!”

How important is storytelling in your work?

Very important, although I rarely think of storytelling in a linear way.

I'm interested in creating narratives through traces, especially when it comes to my immersive work. Music, image and space can create a narrative together without requiring words.

Storytelling, for me, is less about describing what happens and more about constructing the conditions in which listeners can find their own stories.

What makes a track feel “finished” to you?

Usually, it feels finished when removing something would damage it and adding something would only explain it.

This is one of the hardest things to recognise, especially with electronic music, because technically you can continue forever. There is always another layer, another processing chain, another variation.

I've learned to trust incompleteness much more than I used to. Sometimes a sound disappearing too early, a texture remaining unresolved or a silence that initially feels too long is exactly what gives a piece its identity.

So I don't necessarily look for resolution. I look for a kind of internal inevitability: the moment when the piece seems to have established its own rules and no longer needs me to intervene.

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

Beethoven is the central reference in my classical background, particularly because of the way his music transforms structure, tension and expectation. Beyond that, my influences are definitely not limited to music. Architecture has probably affected the way I compose more than any other artistic field. I am interested in the way spaces organise movement and in how a building can tell stories through its silent presence.

Working for years with immersive environments changed my understanding of music profoundly because you stop thinking of sound as something happening in front of an audience. Sound becomes part of an architecture. People move through it, and the physical dimensions of the space affect the perception of time.

Gear and setup

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

DAWless hardware setups.

What’s your favourite piece of gear or plugin, and why?

Probably the Teenage Engineering OP-1. I have instruments that are far more complex and perhaps more distinctive in terms of sound, but the OP-1 has a completely different place in my life.

I find it incredibly creative, but more importantly, it's something I carry with me almost everywhere. Over the years, it has become a sort of security blanket for me.

What piece of gear completely changed your workflow?

Effect pedals applied to the piano.

Challenges

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

I actually think ambient is a very complicated genre, perhaps partly because it is often perceived, even within the music world, as something relatively simple. I sometimes find myself listening to music on YouTube that is presented as ambient, and I realise that my idea of the genre is quite different.

For me, ambient requires a very deep investigation of sound. There is certainly minimalism involved, but I don't see minimalism as simplification. It is almost the opposite: by reducing the number of elements, you give each sound enough space and time to expand, to become present and eventually understandable in a different way. And I think there has to be some kind of narrative behind it, even if that narrative is extremely subtle or never explicitly revealed.

Ambient asks for time, not only from the person making it but also from the person listening to it. There is a conscious choice on both sides. As a composer, you can continuously provide subtle new information, while as a listener, you probably want to dig into it and take your time to do so.

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

I don't really try to force myself out of it anymore. If something isn't happening, I usually move my attention somewhere else and trust that eventually something will bring me back. Very often, this happens through a new instrument because I genuinely enjoy learning how things work and discovering their peculiarities, but it can just as easily come from something completely unrelated to music.

I think curiosity is much more useful than waiting for inspiration. Inspiration sounds like something that has to arrive from somewhere, while curiosity is something you can actively cultivate. As long as I'm curious about something, sooner or later it tends to find its way into the music.

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

It's definitely a complicated relationship. Streaming platforms have made it possible for music to travel in a way that would have been unimaginable not so long ago, and obviously I'm grateful for that. At the same time, they have created an incredibly fast cycle in which there is constant pressure to release something new and remain visible.

I try to separate that mechanism from the actual process of making music as much as possible. I still like thinking about an album as a complete work rather than simply a collection of tracks, even though releasing an album today almost inevitably means working with singles beforehand and communicating the project over a much longer period. I accept that as part of how music circulates today, but I don't want the logic of the platform to become the logic of the music.

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?

I'm extremely interested in AI. I've been exploring it through my work in education, and I use it quite often, mainly for research, visual experimentation, coding and creating interfaces, but not really for making music. Every time I've experimented with AI-generated music in areas close to my own, such as modern classical, classical or ambient, I've found the results quite mediocre.

AI may eventually replace certain kinds of musical content, particularly where music has a more functional role. But when a genre depends on a deeper level of thought, and that depth is also what the listener is looking for, I think the situation becomes very different.

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?

I think both positions can coexist. There are very serious questions around authorship and training data, and also around what happens economically when enormous quantities of content can suddenly be generated at almost no cost to those producing it. I don't think those questions should be dismissed simply because the technology is exciting.

I've already explained how I feel about AI in music, but more broadly, I think we are also witnessing a change in the role of the artist. When the possibility of generating material becomes almost infinite, creation itself is no longer the only central act. Choosing what deserves to be kept, developed and ultimately presented to an audience becomes increasingly important. In that sense, the artist may also become more of a curator, developing skills that traditionally belonged to art directors, curators or supervisors. I think this shift could actually be very stimulating from a cultural point of view because it places even greater importance on vision and the ability to make meaningful choices.

What are you currently working on?

I've just released Aqua Tacita, which is probably the project that has occupied me most intensely over the last period.

At the same time, I'm continuing to develop Mutable Flat Lab in Rome, a physical space I created precisely to allow the different forms and languages I'm interested in to coexist. Music, visual art, architecture, design and technology can intersect there without necessarily belonging to separate disciplines, which reflects quite closely the way I approach my own work.

I'm also currently working on three new immersive projects, all quite substantial, which will bring me back to working on a larger scale. I can't say too much about them yet, but they will occupy a significant part of my work over the coming months.

What advice would you give to new ambient artists?

I would probably tell them not to worry too much about making ambient music in the first place. Genres are useful when we need to describe something, but they can become very limiting when we start using them as instructions.

I think it's much more interesting to understand how you personally perceive it and what kind of relationship you have with your sound. Just do it; the rest will come.

The sound of Luca Longobardi