INTERVIEW · ARTIST
Luciana Brave makes music for cello, modular synth, and the room it is performed in. We spoke with her in a kitchen in Turin.
Luciana Brave doesn’t own a laptop. She owns a cello, a modular synthesiser the size of a kitchen cupboard, and a tape machine that she has been repairing, incrementally, since 2019. “I could bounce everything to a hard drive at the end of a set,” she says, on the video call. “But then I would have the recording, and the recording is the least interesting part.”
We are speaking the week before she plays the Main room of New Festival, a set she has been writing for the specific acoustics of the building. “You told me the ceiling is concrete, and there’s an echo of — four milliseconds, five? — I’m writing with that.”
“Performance is the composition. The recording is a souvenir, if you want one, but the piece only exists that night.”
Brave spent five years at the Milan Conservatory studying cello, then dropped out after a dispute with a teacher who told her the modular synth she had built was “not a real instrument.” She describes the synth now as her second voice. Everything she plays starts on the cello, passes through the synth — which samples, stretches, and re-harmonises it — and comes back out into the room.
We ask what she does when a set goes wrong. “It doesn’t go wrong,” she says. “It goes differently. This is the problem with people who film their sets — they see it afterwards and they compare it to what they wanted. They’re never in the room with the set that actually happened.” She pauses. “The set is always good. The thing in your head is not the set.”
Luciana Brave plays the Main room on Thursday, 20:00. Her new album, Arpa / Slow Splinter, is out on Thrill Jockey in September.