SIGILLUM S Interview

 To talk to Paolo L. Bandera and Eraldo Bernocchi is to enter an essential part of the history of Italian post-industrial, because since 1985, through Sigillum S, they have built a project that is not limited to making music but investigates sound as living matter, as mental space, and as a way of thinking. Born in Milan at a time when the European experimental scene was looking for new directions, Sigillum S became a laboratory where noise, electronics, ritual texture, and conceptual narrative are mixed without obeying fixed formulas. Over the decades they have changed their form, intensity, and focus, going through more ritualistic stages in the eighties and more cinematographic and abstract phases in the nineties until they reached recent works where sound density and technological research dialogue with a mature and direct vision. His work does not pursue the comfort of the listener but proposes an experience that demands attention and openness. In this interview we talk about the origins of Sigillum S, the evolution of the project, its relationship with the Italian experimental scene and the way they understand sound, collaboration, and time today after almost forty years of continuous work.

Greetings and thank you very much for your time. Let me start this conversation… you founded SIGILLUM S in 1985, in a context where noise, ritual and electronics were far from conventional. What cultural, personal or spiritual forces drove them to create a project so unclassifiable from its beginnings? 

PAOLO: from my perspective, this was a kind of conceptual paradox, like a chance meeting of individual identities on related grounds, where we happened to find each other exploring our own personal paths in what was at the time the common framework of the Italian branch of the Temple Of Psychic Youth... in this context, we felt right away a deep interest in surfing the forbidden waves of the subconscious and creating our own symbols of self-expression and liberation, translating into an unique blend of electronic saturation and multi-layered drone references.         

From his first tapes to his current albums, there is a constant in his work, mutation. What is the place of change in your artistic process? Is there an identity behind the multiple masks, or is the mask the face? What were their initial musical, literary, philosophical or mystical references and how have they evolved over time? 

ERALDO: there’s an identity indeed… Paolo and I are the core business of what we are since 40 years. I never saw a mask in what we do, we always acted out of total sincerity. I can’t even think about an acting of sort. We explored, and we continue to do it.  

PAOLO: change is extremely important for SIGILLUM S... everything is a trajectory whose coordinate define our identities through a perpetual quest, so we are our own process, and our method is a function of avoiding repetition.  For me personally, this has been infused by a strong scientific background and love of fringe technologies, with also very precise cultural affiliation with writers like W. S. Burroughs, James Ballard and Philip K. Dick, as well as movie directors like David Cronenberg and David Lynch.   

Can we speak of SIGILLUM S as a total art form, which involves sound, language, aesthetics and philosophy as the same mutant organism? 

ERALDO:  absolutely positive…. this is what we conceived at the beginning. We wanted to be an anti-band, I think we succeeded, first of all, with ourselves. I always dreamed of an entity more than a band.  

PAOLO: you got it right … there is no real separation among all the various components of our approach and sound doesn’t exist without the rest... quite the opposite, as we always start from a target concept and then derive form from there. Also, the idea of a mutant organism is entirely appropriate, as our genes keep evolving through feedback interactions.   

The first demo “SIGILLUM S” seems to be a sound cartography of the ritual trance, of the descent into areas of psychic shadow. How did you build this first sound "rite of passage"? What role did the unconscious or the gnostic play in this process? 

PAOLO: in reality, this is a collection of initial experiments, so, there was no real plan… just a very spontaneous meeting of similar minds. 

"BARDO THOS GROL" is a dark and meditative ethno-ambient gem, based on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. How did you approach the challenge of translating such a dense spiritual guide in frequencies, textures, and atmospheres? 

ERALDO: as before, everything was really straightforward and natural. We had a rack delay that gave us the option to freeze/loop/sample a portion of sound. We sampled parts of Tibetan rituals as well as percussions played by us. We improvised for days until we reached something that in our world was creating the idea of ritual voyage. We recently found unreleased pieces and we’ll release the album on double vinyl with a proper mastering for the first time.  

Was this album a kind of attempt to "accompany" the listener in a symbolic death? How do you understand death within your sound praxis? 

ERALDO: death is one of my main interests. I see it under a positive light as a changing force. Bardo was partly conceived as an assistant to symbolic death, but also as a soundtrack for rituals.   

How do you work on the balance between narrative structures and chaos in your extensive pieces? Is there conscious intention or do they just allow the sound to take over?  

ERALDO: chaos moves by itself and often dictates directions but there’s a sort of narrative that appears within it and that’s the direction. The revealed one. It’s the chaos that reveals the way, under a certain light. We have a clear direction most of the times, but we leave chaos to make some choices.  

PAOLO: there is always a clear direction in the defined targets and the applied strategies, but then we let the untapped potential of deep, spontaneous revelations flow freely through execution and unscheduled matches, to reap the results and consolidate one final product out of many possible shapes.  

The album "Coalescence of Time: Other Conjectures on Future" proposes a journey between black holes, terraforming and decaying cultures. Can we understand this work as a speculative cosmogony that fuses science, science fiction and sound archaeology? 

PAOLO: yes, this is truly cosmic in scale, as we have been trying to create our own future mythologies, without any limitation in size or style, but addressing the subjective nature of time as a gate to overcoming the limits of matter through acoustic phenomena.  In doing so, we may cope with extreme pollution and prohibitive environments, through an unholy mix of sound experiments, alien narrative and fringe philosophy.         

Titles such as "Culture Acidification" or "From Fluid To Entanglement" suggest anthropological mutations. What vision do you have about the future of culture and human consciousness in the age of digital entropy? 

PAOLO: I see an endless marge of planetary catastrophes and post-organic evolution... we are dancing on the verge of an abyss, where humans are just a contingent biological step on the way to an infinite scenario of new energies and travel, absolutely beyond our present comprehension and in full hybridization with technology, as well as other forms of intelligence.         

 

How do scientific and futuristic concepts influence your aesthetics? Do they use science as an existential metaphor, as a symbolic tool, or as a ritualistic platform? 

PAOLO: I have an academic background in chemical and pharmaceutical technologies, which deeply contributes to my mindset and taste for symbols / images: I currently like to define myself as an inorganic realist, who uses rationale attitudes and long-term projections as daily tools, as well as creative filters... so, coming up with wild ideas about future is not simply an attitude or a technique, but truly a means to an end.   

What technologies do you use in this type of work? How do you combine electronic instruments, programming, field recordings, and acoustic manipulation? 

ERALDO: we use DAWs, like everyone, but mostly as recorders. 90% of the creativity is done with analogue synths, drum machines, field recordings. Every convolute in a main container and there’s a subsequent subtraction of elements until sounds are blooming or melodies begin to texture meanings. Structure and mix come after the above.  

Was the album conceived as a linear sound story or as a collection of independent sound artifacts floating in the same time zone? 

ERALDO: the second option. Back in the days we used to work on a more linear concept, nowadays it’s about triggering a synapse to spark the creation of sounds and structures. We use concept/images/recordings … anything.

PAOLO: I don’t think it’s linear at all, but rather a pool of converging sound vectors, dissipating into a variety of time sequences.   

What relationship do they have with trance and altered states of consciousness? Have you used your works in real or experimental ritual contexts? Do you think that the music of Sigillum S can be considered a form of reverse meditation: one that does not calm, but awakens abysses? 

ERALDO: As I explained before we always considered our music as a tool. For ourselves and for other people, at least this was our aim. During the decades we discover that quite a lot of people used our music for ritual aims, which for us is very rewarding. I personally don't consider our music like a form of reverse meditation just something you can use with the approach you find more suitable for your objective. For good or bad I don't care, consequence for users is a personal responsibility.

How has been the most transformative or revealing moment you have experienced creating sound: an epiphany, an emotional breakdown, a spiritual discharge? Do you think there is an authentic spiritual dimension to extreme noise and experimental electronics, or is it more of an aesthetic of denial? 

ERALDO: I don't think it's an aesthetic of denial, of course like in every scene or research there are a lot of fakes and people who are pretending to be something they’re not. I had a very scary experience recording some rituals on tape, that we actually never published. every time I listened to that tape I was discovering something new, mostly voices. It could be my imagination or it could be something else, but I haven’t listened to it since 1986. 

PAOLO: from a psychological and metabolic perspective, I have had a few single moments of epiphany on stage, most likely because of the combination of volume and frequencies, and I think this is it, at least for me... the pure power of extreme sounds to alter perception. Said another way, I don’t deny that there can be spiritual approaches when dealing with experimental electronics, quite the opposite, but that’s not the way I experience them.  

Which technologies or tools are essential to capture the sound you imagine in your mind? How do you maintain the coherence of a vision over 40 years, without repeating or betraying each other musically speaking? 

ERALDO: sampling, synthesis and subwoofers. The rest is evolving with us and vice versa. Probably the only technology we need are our neural functions, other than that everything is unnecessary/necessary. 

PAOLO: throughout the years, the general evolution of digital recording and sampling techniques has certainly helped us in materializing our vision, but our real differentiator is most likely our determination to keep pushing the envelope and craving for more.      

You are going to celebrate 40 years in 2025. What does longevity mean to you in a project like Sigillum S, which has always been on the margins, never in comfort? 

ERALDO: exploring personal utopia, shifting the horizon, never stopping the research. 

PAOLO: It’s just a huge amount of data, no more... and no less.  

What has radically changed in the world around them since 1985, and what remains essentially the same at its artistic core? What does the future tell them? How do you imagine the next creative cycle after this celebration? 

ERALDO: mostly communications and the possibility to spread creativity to more wide audience. I’m struggling to imagine creativity in the future as there are so many menaces to eat that’s what I feel is at the end will end up as a very big flat vibrating social network full of crap. 

PAOLO: the world has changed dramatically since 1985, but, like then, even now nothing is true and everything is permitted, so we will happily deal with more challenges when they manifest themselves.  

“Aborted Towns, the Deadly Silence Before Utopia”album, sounds like an archaeology of the lost future. What was the conceptual starting point for this album? What posthuman or post-civilizational vision did they want to capture? 

PAOLO: it’s not about a lost future, but a bridge to unexpected (and mostly unknown) things to come... whether they include humans or not is really a question mark.   

In Eraldo's words, each track is like "a lost coil of sound documenting a world on the brink of oblivion." Do you think that sound can function as an archaeological document of non-existent realities? 

ERALDO: to be honest oblivion in front of our eyes till we try to document reality that for some people could be non-existent but at least for me it is right in front of my eyes. 

Pieces like "Permafrost" or "Infective Carnations" seem viral, organic, morbid. What role does symbolic biology play in your work? Is the body present, absent, or decomposed? 

ERALDO: for me more decomposed, but it’s very difficult to use certain words because everything I do is directly connected to my daily life. Each track could change his face each day. 

PAOLO: bodies and biology are fully present, but not necessarily in a standard form... they twist and decay, but they also thrive and evolve, embracing new materials and alternative intelligences.    

At what point do you feel that a work like Aborted Towns is finished, if its aesthetic is precisely that of the unfinished, the degraded and the spectral? 

 

ERALDO: nothing we do, or we did is finished, that’s why we constantly research and gone. The spectral form of things will appear when I’ll be dead. 

PAOLO: it’s never finished, at least for now, because we keep performing it on stage and change it constantly, so it will stop evolving when we decide to move somewhere else.  

Finally, from your perspective as an artist, what is beyond sound? 

ERALDO: everything and nothing. 

PAOLO: the shape of universes to come. 

 

SIGILLUM S

https://sigillum-s.bandcamp.com