Designing ambient symphonies

Tracking him down is tantamount to searching for the Holy Grail, not because he is that difficult to find, but because he spends much of his time away from the island or locked away in his studio.

Travelling is in his blood, but his journeys abroad are usually to do with the sublime music he makes, spreads and shares on a global scale rather than for touristic concerns.

He is Maltese musician Mario Sammut, but fans of his engulfing sonic sculptures know himbetter as Cygna, quite possibly Malta’s best-kept secret musical phenomenon.

A free spirit in the true sense of the word, Sammut is guided primarily by the creative urge to convey emotions through music, often the kind that conjures images of wide, open spaces and soul-liberating otherworldliness.

It wasn’t always like that, however, and as with several other musicians, Sammut’s first musical steps were guided and overtly academic.

“I started studying classical piano when I was six years old,” he says. “That lasted for about six or seven years, around which time I decided to pack it all in.”

The hiatus only lasted around a year, however. “By then, synthesizers had arrived and opened up a whole new world for me to explore,” he says.

Once he had got his hands on a synth, Sammut wasted no time in joining his first band, Obscuritas Aeternum, playing black metal. Having heard Sammut’s all-engulfing, often-meditative, aural soundscapes, black metal is probably the last genre I would have expected him to be interested in.

“I’m a big black metal fan,” he says. “It is the music I listen to the minute I wake up, day in day out.”

Still ruminating over this rather interesting though surprising discovery, I ask whether it was his four-year stint in the band that led him to pursue a solo career.

“Not quite,” he replies. “I was already doing my own thing even when I was in the band.”

Hugely interested in arrangements from the very beginning – a result of his classical roots I suppose – he explains how he used to get the guitarists in the band to play the violin and cello parts.

As he reminisces, I get a feeling Sammut belongs to that category of musician who likes to be in control rather than controlled. He admits this is probably true.

Having flown solo for the past five or so years, Sammut says he totally loves to work alone as he feels there is more space for him to explore new ideas.

“Working on my own is creatively liberating as it frees me from having to rely on others in order to move ahead with what I’m doing. Using words to communicate isn’t as effective as projecting emotions through musical notes.”

I’m fascinated when he explains that despite the deeply electronic nature of his music, his approach to composing remains rooted within the relatively classical set-up of piano, harp, violin and cello.

“The electronic sounds come later; an enhancement to the music rather than the essence… but they play a vital role in the final production,” he says.

Creating original music has also been a definitive characteristic in Sammut’s musical development. He has always hated playing other people’s music.

“When I was studying, having to learn other composer’s pieces was torture for me. I love Chopin, but I don’t need to learn his music by heart to appreciate it!”

He emphasises that learning to play those pieces never gave him the same gratification that writing his own music does, which is why he decided to quit studying and focus on doing his own thing.

Bearing in mind he has been doing his own thing for a number of years now, as well as the fact that he is constantly working on new ideas, one assumes there must be a significant archive of music waiting to be released.

Apart from his new album Opus Ena, Cygna’s music has featured on various compilations by key labels such as Ultimae.com in France, Audio Ashram in India and Sentimony Records in Ukraine.

Most of his new work goes through a lot of changes; sometimes it is forgotten or even lost.

“I write and delete ideas constantly and if I spend a few days or weeks working on something, I can easily get bored and move on to something new,” he says. In my mind I’m picturing a hard disk brimming with unfinished works in progress.

“There used to be even more,” he says, with a hint of disappointment as well as a look of resignation when he tells me how he lost all of the music he had written in the early years.

“I had about 200 midi files saved on four floppy disks which I always carried around in my pocket. Unfortunately, I never made back-ups and lost all the data when the disks ended up in the washing machine.” If it weren’t so frustrating, such an incident could almost be funny.

Despite that setback, however, Sammut managed to maintain his creative momentum.

“I’ve always wanted to release my own album, so the natural thing for me was to put that mishap behind me and move forward.” Embracing the internet’s widespread reach, he uploaded some of his music onto his personal Myspace site.

He was contacted by a Greek label asking for more of his music and that led to the birth of Cygna as a project. That was four years ago; three since the release of his Live @ Earth Garden album, which was released in Greece only and distributed to some 3,000 people.

Since then, Sammut has seen his work increasingly picked and featured in various key compilations and magazine reviews alongside some of the top names in ambient music, resulting in a prominent international profile and a reputation as one of the leading names in the genre.

Music aside, he stresses upon the importance of his interest in the scene behind electronic music.

“I studied electronics at Fellenberg Institute and I’ve always been into how things work in order to design and build them myself. My interest goes beyond the musical aspect of electronica; I’m equally enthralled by the machine that produces the sounds.”

This brings to mind the term ‘sound design’, which seems to have gained ground in contemporary electronic music.

Sammut explains that he sees sound design as the art of sculpting sounds that are used to enhance a musical arrangement. He proceeds to give me a small taste of the endless sounds he has created (and manipulated) for different compositions, including some very interesting ones he sampled from a homemade waterphone, which he describes as “a complex instrument that offers a never-ending source of sounds”.

Along the way he also mentions the various projects he has written music for – from art installations and exhibitions to film and TV productions as well as theatre, his best known being that for The Rubberbodies Collective – acknowledging that he gets his inspiration from pretty much anything and everything without exception, interpreting it all in his own unique way.

Despite his burgeoning public profile, Sammut admits he’d much rather lock himself awayin the studio than perform liveon stage.

“I’m in my element when I’m surrounded by the tools that help me realise what is in my head. In the studio I have everything I need. Playing live offers a different kind of excitement, but the studio is the place I’m most comfortable in,” he says.

Nevertheless, he has performed live various times, more often than not at festivals abroad, among them two editions of the Glastonbury Festival in England, and events in Croatia, Greece, Spain, the UK, Italy and France.

He will be playing at a Pinkpube event in Buskett on August 6.

Locally, his last live performance was the launch of Opus Ena, his debut album, featuring seven lush slices of open-ended ambient music that is alluringin its ethereal quality andoverwhelming in the way it colludes with the emotive side of the listener.

The launch was held at the Museum of Fine Arts in Valletta and employed an innovative approach where all those present wore headphones to get a better grasp of the experience.

“The idea was to ‘isolate’ each individual and eliminate external distractions so that each person could immerse themselves wholly in the music,” says Sammut.

It was definitely not the most conventional of album launches, but then again, Sammut doesn’t do normal; the adventurous nature of his music confirms that his aspirations are way above and beyond the norm.

Opus Ena is out now on IT Records as a three-part digipack. The album is available via iTunes or directly from the artist by sending an e-mail to info@cygnamusic.com.

www.cygnamusic.com

bugeja.michael@gmail.com