Luigui Bleand: The Unseen Sacrifice
Luigui Bleand writes in his diary, after attending Vogue World: Milano in recent days, about what a finished work holds in silence – craft, hours, decisions and people – and about how that way of seeing guides his music.
Portofino, Italy
PORTOFINO, ITALY — In recent days I was at Vogue World: Milano. On 22 September, the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II hosted the fifth edition of the event, the first in Italy. Vogue conceived the show around craftsmanship and the human touch in the age of technology, as a continuous dialogue between the hand and the machine.
I have been thinking about this for some time, and now it has become clearer to me: I have seen the sacrifice people make behind everything that is created. I do not say it as a lament, but as an acknowledgement. A finished work presents itself cleanly, as if it had arrived on its own.
What is not seen is almost everything. The craft learnt over years, the hours no one counts, the decisions taken and the many ideas set aside, the sensitivity of someone who knew when to persist and when to stop. And, above all, the people who sustain a work without their name ever appearing. The audience receives the result; the journey stays with those who travelled it.
That is why I place such value on the way the show began. It opened with three craftspeople presenting objects they had helped to create: a model of the Duomo, a celestial sphere and a loom. Before anything else, the work of the hands was brought to the fore. The loom, in particular, sums up patience for me: thread by thread, nothing appears all at once.
I find the same patience in the Coro di voci bianche – the children’s choir – of the Accademia Teatro alla Scala. According to Vogue Italia, its young singers are admitted after an audition and a two-year preparatory course, and before the show they rehearsed the pieces together. Paolo Gavazzeni, artistic coordinator at La Scala, said in its pages that these children “will be the adults of tomorrow”. That idea stays with me: in a choir you learn, rehearsal by rehearsal, to listen to whoever is singing beside you, to hold a note and to leave room for another voice.
I think about it through music. Only a few days ago I announced my return to the music industry; by my own count, that makes fifteen years of records. I am finishing my album, “GOAT”, at Universal Music Studios in Milan, and Marisa de Filippis and I are producing it entirely ourselves. A finished song lasts a few minutes; behind it, unheard, lie the small decisions that define it and the hours of listening it demands.
Hence my preference for speaking of collaboration rather than individual merit. At Bleand Style Recordings, my label and my studio, I write, produce and direct my music, and even so I know that nothing important is ever made entirely alone. A record carries names on its cover, but behind it there are always more hands than the cover can hold. To collaborate, for me, is to listen to one another, to give way when needed and to work an idea through together until it finds its form. On this record, the hands closest to mine have been Marisa’s.
When I think about technology, I return to that dialogue between the hand and the machine. “GOAT” blends more than seven rhythms, and to develop and refine its sound I have relied on technological tools that I consider allies: they help me and extend what I can do. But they do not decide for me. Choosing a rhythm, knowing when a voice should stand alone, recognising the moment a song is finished and accepting the sacrifice all of that demands are still human decisions.
It is with that same conviction that I think of Siamo Arrivati, the music production company Marisa and I founded early this year. Our vision is to create music, entertainment and new creative environments through technology and superintelligence. It is a horizon we are walking towards, and when I picture it I always see people making the decisions that matter.
At the close of the show, more than 6,000 paper objects were released, each folded by hand from a single sheet, without glue. It seems to me the truest image of what I mean: something light, lasting only an instant, holds within it patient work that almost no one sees.
I return to my work grateful to those who do things well even when it goes unnoticed, to those who teach and those who learn, to those who sustain a work from a place that never makes it into the picture. Over the years I have learnt to value the shine of the result less than the care that made it possible. That is what I try to put into my music, song by song.