alcnoir delivers music characterised by its lo-fi textures, heavy use of reverb, crackles, atmospheric spoken word samples, dusty sounds and ukg vibes. File next to Burial.
Read our discussion with the talented producer below!
Describe your sound in 3 words
Nostalgic, melancholic, noir
Tell us a few things about drawn the line. What is the main idea in it?
I made “Drawn the Line” around October 2023. I had just released my first album, but I was already deep into the second one.
With that record, I wanted a colder and greyer atmosphere. I remember that period really well.
I was playing GTA IV a lot, going out at night with my friends, and the weather was freezing. All of that fed directly into the mood of the music.
Back then I had this habit of making a track during the day, then playing it at night for my friends through a tiny portable speaker, outside in the cold and the fog of Piedmont. If it still felt right in that setting, I knew it belonged on the album.
I also remember finding the vocal sample completely by accident. It was this blues sample, and I could not believe how naturally it fit the track. At the same time, I never expected it to become my most played song, not just on the album but overall. I honestly thought “come to me” would be the one.
Even now, I am still really happy with how that whole record came out. I cannot wait to explore a new sound, obviously different from relate, which is my second album and the one that includes “Drawn the Line”, while keeping the same sense of unity I found on that project.
Your music carries strong Burial-inspired vibes. You also make use of spoken word samples in many of your tracks. Can you walk us through your creative process and how you build your tracks?
A quick bit of context first. Before I started putting music out on Spotify, I had already been producing for years. I made a lot of different kinds of music, and I still produce for myself and for friends in very different styles. I have worked around sounds inspired by Flume, FlyLo, SOPHIE, Monte Booker, and many others. Before alcnoir, I did not really know what I wanted to release and what I wanted to leave behind. Then I discovered Burial.
Burial changed the way I see music. He made me understand that music does not need to be difficult, it needs to make you feel something. That completely changed my mindset. When you produce, you should not feel like a professor. You should go back to being a child and just play. When you approach sound like that, but with the skills you have built over years of producing, you can end up with something really special.
I also felt I needed to give the project a real purpose. I did not want it to be just a matter of making songs and uploading them. I wanted to build a sonic story, a suggestive world people could step into. To do that, I needed a sound that felt cohesive, something familiar but still new.
As for the process itself, I often start by spending days building a drum rack from scratch. Ableton nerds will get it.
I put a huge amount of attention into drums because I want the groove and the stereo image to sit at the top of the hierarchy.
Once that foundation is there, I lay down chords and the rest tends to come naturally.
For vocals, I pull material from all kinds of places and play with it in different ways. Sometimes I use granular synthesis, other times I slice the audio and tune every piece manually, one by one.
Then I place all of that over an atmospheric layer made from ambient sounds, often taken from games like SOMA, Outer Wilds, Max Payne, and others.
What made you gravitate towards electronika?
I listen to all kinds of music, including pop and R&B, where the vocals are the main focus. Bringing the emotional force of vocal lines into UK electronic music is something Burial did, whether intentionally or not, and that really hit me. I found Burial through Frank Ocean’s Blonded Radio, by the way.
I was already listening to very technical electronic music before that. I have always loved Noisia, Skrillex, SOPHIE, and Flume. That is a very different kind of mood from what I make under alcnoir, and from electronica in general. What pushed me in that direction was my decision to put emotion first in my tracks.
I do not actually listen to much electronica, but I love making it. There is a huge gap between what I listen to and what I produce. One thing a lot of people do not realize, but producers definitely will, is how much self-criticism shapes the process. Most artists hate what they make. I tried to solve that in two ways. First, by putting the listener first. Second, by making albums.
Electronica felt like the perfect balance between building emotional worlds, which is what albums allow you to do, and keeping some of the technical side that I never wanted to lose completely.
Artists and people that have influenced you?
I genuinely think Greg Egan is the most intelligent and at the same time most creative person alive right now.
So even if he has nothing to do with music, he is at the top of my list of influences.
I am also a huge fan of Thomas Grip, a video game creative director who I think is a genius.
Musically, it frustrates me that so many people still do not understand how important Noisia are. Those three Dutch guys are like the Einstein, Niels Bohr, and Planck of music.
Then of course there is Burial. He completely opened my eyes. He made me feel something so deeply that it almost caught me off guard, and that almost never happens to me with music. Usually only films do that.
Then there is SOPHIE. I still cannot believe she is gone. A rare artist, and very likely someone who influenced your favorite artist too. Thank you, SOPHIE.
How do you relate to the music scene of Italy?
Since I was 13, I have produced for quite a few rappers and trappers all over Italy. None of them were famous, obviously, but I put in a serious amount of groundwork.
Even now I still produce for a few people, including one of my closest friends from my city, and I really enjoy it. Hearing my beats played live and seeing people react to them matters a lot to me.
It is not just a side activity. I actually need it. Producing for him is very different from making music for alcnoir. It gives me space to experiment, to try out wild ideas, and sometimes those ideas find their way back into my own project later.
If we are talking specifically about the Italian electronic scene though, I do not really know anyone.
I also want to push back against a cliché. A lot of people think Italy is postcard material, sun, sea, pizza, and all that. That is only true in the south and in some parts of central Italy.
I live in a city in the north that feels more like Siberia, especially in autumn and winter.
Where I live, there is fog for most of the year, people are cold with each other, and everything around us is industry and pollution. It is a brutalist kind of place. Very Burial-coded.
What advice would you give to your younger self?
I am almost 22 now, so my younger self was still a teenager. I would just tell him, “Things will get better, just not in the way you expect.”
What is the story behind your name?
Before alcnoir, that was just the name of my personal Instagram account. The reason was actually very simple and kind of ridiculous.
I am obsessed with clean handles, no underscores, no dots, nothing messy. It is not a marketing thing, it is just a weird personal principle.
The handle @alcnoir was free, so I took it. At that point I had already released my first two albums under another name, but later I decided to rebrand.
Instead of inventing something completely new, I just switched to alcnoir and turned my personal profile into my music profile.
There were a few reasons behind that rebrand, but one of them was that alcnoir just fit the music much better than the old name did.
Thank you!
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