Short Stories by Gabriele Bombardini

Haiku are short poems that use sensory language to capture a feeling or image. They are often inspired by natural elements, a moment of beauty, or an exciting experience. Haiku poetry was developed by Japanese poets, and has been adapted to other languages by poets of all nations.
I immediately associated Gabriele's way of proceeding with this work with this literary composition, which I have frequented so much in the past.
Some would define it, due to the brevity of the compositions, as "aphorismic" but I don't agree at all. There is nothing aphoristic in this music. The aphorism, in its lapidity, precisely outlines the contours of a reasoning and it seems to me that Gabriele tried to avoid this trait.
In the need for certainties of our derelict consumer society (as in the incipit of Stefano Benni's Compagnia dei celestini: «they were a strange and unfortunate people. Welfare had deprived them of everything.») the time and way of looking inside becomes rare, tiring, foreign to individual behaviors and needs. Widespread solipsism, lack of time, ability or need for introspection, because paradoxically the latter is considered wrong, but also out of self-censorship or modesty.
I think that this type of artistic experience certainly passes through a practice that draws from one's overall language, from one's tactile memory, from chance, from the fortuitous "decision" of a moment, which would have been different a second later, from the suggestion of a sound that it will be unrepeatable, but also from the exploration of that border that you have never crossed and where you have to give yourself, invent new "words" or signs never used in order to be able to tell. This is what is difficult, what is tiring, even in the spontaneity of a "musical gesture" which is in any case the fruit of a lifetime's experiences.
I therefore find it admirable, truly admirable, the ability to stop one's emotions, return them to oneself, and offer them to others through a record. For the reasons I was talking about before, the drive to produce and make a work public, in a cultural climate like this, is totally individual and passionately linked to the old and healthy way of being a musician: the musician plays, has ideas, produces them, he records them, and by publishing them he “distances” them from himself.
Let's go back to Gabriele's haiku.
This type of music is sometimes defined as "descriptive", even cinematically speaking. This adjective is used in its noblest sense. I don't think so. This listening did not arouse any image, any "film" in me.
I didn't feel the need. Over time I have learned, or I delude myself that I have learned, through the infinite hours of listening that I have given myself, to reach the strength of the emotion that is inside and behind things, and that is enough for me. That seems like the core to me. The center and essence of the fact in which I am participating as a listener. I speak for myself obviously. It's always my subjective, but I find that the images become predictable and don't renew themselves with each listen.
While listening to Gabriele's music, I felt a need for circularity. I put the repeat on the MP3 player I have on my computer, and I immersed myself so much in the sound that I almost didn't notice the brief break necessary for the song to start again. And I don't consider the pieces too short at all, but I liked making them become little mantras. They also work very well in their consequentiality. As I always say, the most important part of the "story", in projects like this, is in the sound itself: it partly deconstructs the need for the forms and ways in which music is usually organised. It is the sound that becomes “Structure”.

Franco Ranieri

Chitarrista e produttore, Gabriele Bombardini fonde jazz, elettronica e world music. Ha collaborato con grandi artisti italiani e fondato progetti come Liquid Desire ed EMO. Autore di album originali e musiche per teatro e danza, insegna chitarra a Ravenna.

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