Roberto Musci, born in Milan in 1956, is an Italian composer, performer, saxophonist, guitarist, and visual artist known for blending field recording, traditional ethnic sounds, and modern electronic techniques. His innovative approach bridges the gap between global field recordings and experimental music, earning him recognition in both the commercial and fine art worlds. From 1974 to 1985, Musci traveled extensively through Africa, India, and the Far East, collecting ethnic instruments and field recordings, which formed the foundation of his distinctive style.
Upon returning to Italy, Musci began combining these traditional sounds with synthesizers and electronics, creating a unique fusion of ancient and modern influences. His 1987 album Water Messages on Desert Sand, composed with Giovanni Venosta, was Grammy-nominated in the UK. Musci has since released numerous albums on labels like Island Records and Music from Memory, while composing for films, theater, and dance, and contributing to audiovisual installations.
Musci continues to push boundaries through audio-visual projects like Xenomorphs and Pangea Panthalassa. In this interview, we explore his lesser known work as a visual artist in addition to his storied career as a boundary-pushing composer.
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Brady Walker: Why create art under the name Wayang?
Robert Musci: The term “Wayang” comes from “Wayang Kulit,” which is the traditional shadow theater of Java (Indonesia) and is derived from “Bayang,” which in Indonesian means “shadow.” Shadow theater is an extremely fascinating performance.
In Wayang Kulit, finely crafted leather puppets are used to tell stories, often based on ancient epics such as the Ramayana and Mahabharata. The puppets are lit from behind, casting their shadows onto a screen, creating a mesmerizing visual experience. These performances often incorporate music, dialogue, and elaborate narration, blending cultural heritage with entertainment.
It is not only an art form, but also a way to convey moral lessons, social commentary and cultural values. I have seen several performances of this theater in Indonesia and have always been fascinated by shadows and have often identified with them.
Shadows also hold deep symbolic meaning in various religious and spiritual traditions. In Buddhism, for example, the shadow represents the impermanence and transitory nature of existence. It serves as a reminder of the transitory nature of life and the importance of embracing change and detachment. Similarly, in Hinduism, shadows are seen as a metaphor for the illusory nature of the material world, urging individuals to look beyond the surface and seek enlightenment.
Shadows can represent untold stories, forgotten traditions. Furthermore, shadows can also be spoken of in a symbolic context, such as in rituals and practices that address themes of death, loss, and memory, often present in the traditions of different cultures.
For all these reasons, I chose Wayang as my creative avatar.
Brady Walker: When did you start creating visual/video art? What did your practice look like then?
Robert Musci: Always. I started by creating the covers of my records using the computer graphics of the time. (It was the 80s and we worked with Commodore 64 and Atari. The Mac was only for the rich!). Then with the evolution of computer graphics programs I started to use them as a complement to my music by creating videos and musical NFTs.
Brady Walker: Can you explain the “Audiopainting” technique you developed? How do sound and visuals interact in real-time during your performances? How much of your NFT output uses that technique?
Robert Musci: Audiopainting uses an algorithm of “Quartz Composer” which receives video data (colors and movements) that are recorded via the camera together with sounds (frequency and timbre) which are recorded with a microphone (delay, reverb, pitch and envelopes). Sounds modify video images (colors, speed, delay or overlapping or multiplication effects). All this creates an “Audiopainting” loop with music: it’s like painting with music and creating music with images in real time. I made several videos for my multimedia installations, for live concerts and for performances of other musicians.
I also used the audiopainting technique in my “Chronophotograpy” project. This is a work on images with digital algorithms, using filters of Quartz Composer, so the music modifies the speed and the repetitions of the images.
Chronophotography is a photographic technique from the Victorian era that captures a number of phases of movements. Eadweard Muybridge and Etienne-Jules Marey are known for their pioneering work on human and animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that predated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
I used it partly in the NFTs of the Silicon-Based Life project.
Brady Walker: When you create visual art, it is often in response to a musical idea or do the visuals typically come first? Or do the ideas come from elsewhere and get interpreted as both music and visuals?
Robert Musci: Starting from the assumption that “Sight often deceives, hearing does not,” surely the first input is musical. Often I happen to read something and transform it into music, as happened for my album Melanesia.
I read an article in which there was talk of a genetic study on the populations of Melanesia. Melanesia is a large area made up of several groups of islands: Papua New Guinea, Irian Jaya, Vanuatu, New Hebrides, New Caledonia, Solomon Islands, Fiji, Moluccas, Loyalty Islands, Torres Strait Islands and Bismarck Islands.
The name of Melanesia derives from the Greek melas “black” and nesoi “islands” due to the dark skin of its inhabitants. The origins of peoples of Melanesia are very ancient: several studies have highlighted in their DNA genetic traits that can be traced back to the man of Neanderthal and Denisova (about 70,000 years ago). In addition, there is an indigenous genetic oddity: about 10% of dark-skinned islanders sport bright blonde hair not derived from contacts with American or European navigators. Their isolation has preserved primitive culture and, perhaps, music.
For the music I use traditional ethnic music from Melanesia: flute, voice, pan flute, mouth arc, percussion. It is traditional music of the populations of Kanaki, Itamul, Kaluli, Niugini, Abelam, Huli, Enga.
I wanted to create a fusion between ancient Melanesian music and contemporary chamber music.
Brady Walker: Pangea Panthalassa, minted on the dearly departed Async Art, is a beautiful culmination of decades of field recording and research on your part. Can you tell me a little bit about how this project came together and the work that went into it?
Robert Musci: Async Art was an amazing artistic idea: art (images and music) that changes over time or randomly through composition algorithms.
“Pangea” is the name of the supercontinent that existed between 540 and 200 million years ago, during the Paleozoic and Mesozoic periods. The name “Pangea” means “all the earth,” from the ancient Greek “πᾶν” = “all” and “γαῖα” = “earth.”
The vast ocean that surrounded Pangea is called “Panthalassa,” from the ancient Greek “πᾶν” = “all” and “θάλασσα” = “sea.” Humans appeared on earth about 300,000 years ago, by which time the landmasses and oceans had divided, forming Laurasia and Gondwana, and eventually, the world we know today.
In this project, I imagined that Pangea was inhabited by humans and that a global culture was born without divisions created by borders, wars, religions, or ethnic groups.
The music and images of Pangea unite all the cultures of the world: Africa (voices), the Middle East (darbuka, ney, finger cymbals), the Far East (veena, sarangi, tabla, mridangam, pipa lute), Europe (piano, guitar, harp, marimba, clarinet, flute, orchestra), America (banjo), and Oceania (voices).
The Async collection “Pangea Panthalassa” includes 100 unique pieces generated by combinations of two main themes: Pangea and Panthalassa, with 18 musical instruments from around the world and 5 Legendary Editions.
As in Indian classical music, which uses raga (raga, in Sanskrit, meaning “color” or “passion,” is a melodic framework in Indian classical music; each raga has a rasa, or the emotion it evokes in the listener), I used different colors for the musicians in Pangea & Panthalassa to express the feelings that their instruments and music evoke. Art does not respect borders; it transcends ethnic groups, disregards religions, and blends cultures to create surprising masterpieces.
Brady Walker: Can you explain the inspiration and thinking behind 99 African Women? What is the line that connects pianist Keith Tippett and the African diaspora to Italy?
Robert Musci: Over the past 10 years, more than a million migrants have arrived from Africa on Italian shores, and at least 30,000 people are believed to have drowned in the Mediterranean Sea on their way to Italy. Many of them are women and children.
For us, they are often just numbers communicated by the media, but what happens to them once they arrive? They often disappear, like ghosts. Who are they? Where do they come from? What did they do in their country? What are they looking for? What are they running from?
99 African Women is a musical NFT that tells the stories of migrant women: poor, rich, healthy, sick, Muslim, Catholic, animist, Orthodox, living in cities, in villages, in the countryside, on the edge of rivers, by the sea, in the forest—sorceresses, witches, healers, nurses, doctors, graduates, computer scientists, workers, unemployed, prostitutes, drug addicts, homeless, models, photographers, girls, mothers, grandmothers, guerrillas, terrorists, soldiers, musicians, dancers, cooks, hungry, thirsty, hunters, athletic, sad, happy, thoughtful, scared, raped, wounded.
All profits from the sale will be donated to charity, specifically to the United Nations Refugee Agency (UNHCR), which helps save lives and build better futures for millions of people forced to flee their homes.
In the mid-1970s, Keith Tippett formed a musical group with London-based South Africans Harry Miller (bass) and Louis Moholo (drums), who were South African musical exiles from apartheid. Over dinners we shared, we often talked about Africa and that terrible political period of segregation in South Africa. I used a piece of music that we played as a duo for 99 African Women, remembering those moments.
Brady Walker: How did you go about creating your Jellyfish series?
Robert Musci: It was originally an NFT for Async Art that changed over a 24-hour period: the NFT featured a jellyfish every hour throughout the day (so 24 jellyfish).
For many years, I have been scuba diving and have always found jellyfish to be beautiful creatures.
Jellyfish are very ancient animals. Jellyfish fossils have been found dating back more than 550 million years (Cambrian period), 250 million years before dinosaurs appeared on Earth.
Some of them are considered eternal animals, as they can transform themselves from jellyfish to polyps in an eternal life cycle. When humans and all other animals are extinct, jellyfish may be the only living beings to populate our planet—and perhaps they will also learn to fly, living not only in the water but also in the air.
And when jellyfish sleep, they often dream of music…
Brady Walker: Much of your visual work is inspired by the fringes of biology—Xenomorphs, Synthetic Human Embryos, and Silicon-Carbon-Based Life come to mind. Do you have a scientific background? What does your intellectual diet regarding biology and science in general look like?
Robert Musci: I have a degree in medicine, and I follow the evolution of experimental biological techniques, especially those linked to artificial intelligence.
I have always loved the mix of visual art, music, and advanced technology.
My Xenomorphs Cell project consists of 4 NFTs of experimental graphic synthesis with video and music, correlated and inspired by the most recent and innovative scientific discoveries in xenobiology and advanced research in biotechnology. This includes the creation of synthetic polymer XNAs, a synthetic polymer created in the laboratory that can carry new and alien genetic information similar to human DNA but with different molecular constituents.
Because XNAs are able to pass genetic information from one generation to the next, XNAs could serve as the building blocks for completely new genetic systems and create synthetic life (xeno-organisms).
Creating a genetic code of XNAs with more bases yields endless opportunities for genetic modification and expansion of chemical functionality. Using the chemical formulas of the components of the new Xeno-DNA, its three-dimensional structure, and interfacing them with mathematical formulas for graphic synthesis and movement, I imagined the creation of xeno cells with three different bases: Threose, Glycol, and Hexose.
I created 4 videos, each 2 minutes long, highlighting the evolution of the development of three different xeno-cells in various stages of development (mitosis, meiosis), with music composed for each stage, along with scientific information and bibliography.
For the Silicon-Carbon-Based Life NFT project, I attempted to transform a scientific article I read in Science into an NFT.
In 2016, a group of researchers from the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), coordinated by Frances H. Arnold (who specializes in biocatalysis, protein engineering, evolutionary enzyme, and synthetic biology), managed to create carbon-silicon bonds in living cells, demonstrating for the first time that nature can incorporate silicon into DNA molecules, creating silicon-based xeno DNA.
Silicon is present in the shells of unicellular algae called diatoms, which use it to build a protective barrier. It is also present in horsetails, considered the most ancient and widespread plants on almost all continents. They extract silicon from the earth and concentrate it in the stem, making it hard and difficult to chew, to discourage herbivores.
Researchers began the creation of silicon- and carbon-based organisms by isolating a protein that occurs naturally in the bacterium Rhodothermus marinus, which thrives in Icelandic hot springs, and inserted it into Escherichia coli, a bacterium that commonly lives in our bodies, to create a xeno bacterium.
This discovery opens up the real possibility of creating a life form with a genetic base of silicon-carbon Xeno DNA, with extraordinary implications for astrobiology—a potential for life on other planets. This discovery could also help doctors and researchers develop new drugs and innovative industrial catalysts.
Bio-silicon has also been used in novels by many science fiction authors of the Cyberpunk genre, such as William Gibson and Bruce Sterling.
The Silicon-Carbon-Based Life project consists of 4 NFT videos with music, which illustrate the different stages of meiosis (a process where a single cell divides twice to produce four cells containing half the original amount of genetic information) for the birth of new life.
I have used AI programs, combining music, art, and poetry in my NFT project Ukiyo-e A.I.
With Ukiyo-e A.I. I tried to recreate the spirit that pervades Japanese Ukiyo-e painting—the sensations, the colors, the flavors that these paintings evoke in me—integrating it with traditional Japanese music and Haiku poetry. I used neural networks GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks), integrating VQGAN (Vector Quantized Generative Adversarial Network) and CLIP (Contrastive Language-Image Pre-Training).
In the VQGAN and CLIP neural network for the Ukiyo-e A.I. project, I inserted images of Ukiyo-e paintings created by the great Japanese masters representing samurai, geishas, kabuki actors, and animals. I linked traditional Japanese music for shamisen, shakuhachi, koto, and kabuki orchestra music, transformed into spectrograms, to the images.
Haiku: traditional Japanese short poetry compositions.
Brady Walker: Your travels between 1974 and 1985 played a major role in shaping your music. What initially inspired you to explore non-Western music traditions?
Robert Musci: My music is a travel story without anthropological or musicological pretensions: just a story. I tried to tell the sensations felt when entering into a relationship with many worlds far from our daily life, the colors, the smells, the flavors and the noises of life.
Ever since I began to be interested in music, I have always been fascinated by music that fused Western traditions with ethnic music. During my travels, music was the daily soundtrack of the life of the people I met.
The greatest musical influence I had was that with Indian music and culture. I was struck by the constant presence of music in the daily life of India (ceremonies, birth, weddings, death, street parties, pilgrimages…) and by the profound beauty and spirituality of the millenary Indian musical tradition. And, becoming curious and delving into the traditional music of the different worlds I have known, has become natural.
Brady Walker: Can you describe a specific experience or moment during your travels that had a profound impact on your musical approach?
Robert Musci: Practically on every trip I’ve taken. Surely two episodes happened in India and in Africa.
The first was the discovery of the acoustics of Hindu temples.
Some of the most fascinating temples in southern India hold treasures harmoniously integrated into their architectural structure: musical or sound columns. These are groups of columns, carved from a single monolith, that not only astonish with their beauty and aesthetic refinement but also have the “magical” power to produce sound when struck by hand or with a ring.
Some rocks (phonolites) contain various minerals and a significant quantity of silicon, which gives them the ability to produce sounds when struck. These columns can be found in temples such as Nellaiappar (Tirunelveli, Tamil Nadu) and the Vithala Temple in Hampi.
Some Indian temples were built with psychoacoustic theories in mind, designed to enhance devotional chants by bouncing sounds between the vaults and columns. Listening is an extraordinary and alienating experience.
The other episode was my encounter with the polyphonic vocal music of the Aka and Bambuti pygmies of Central Africa. Their exciting and extraordinary vocal music is something I have used in several of my songs.
Brady Walker: You’ve collected traditional instruments from various parts of the world. How do these instruments influence the way you compose and perform today?
Robert Musci: Non-European musical instruments are very different from those we are used to. Non-European music is not divided into semitones but often uses 1/4 of a tone and therefore the instruments must be able to play them. We often have instruments that are physically tuned according to the type of music that must be played (an example are the frets of the sitar). Instruments that use empty gourds as a sounding board, instruments without a keyboard, played only by touching the strings with the fingers (sarangi) and instruments with resonance strings (that sound made to vibrate by the main strings). All these things have changed my way of creating sounds and composing music.
Brady Walker: Can you talk about your collaboration with sociologist Pierre Bourdieu and how that project intersected with your musical work?
Robert Musci: I was contacted by Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen (Kostanz, Germany) who had organized an exhibition with more than 1100 photographs taken by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu in Algeria between 1957 and 1961. Bourdieu, considered the main French sociologist of the post-war period, used these photos of his research on the rural and daily life of the country and its people to create and support his sociological theories, founding what is called “visual sociology”. They asked me for an in-depth analysis of the traditional music of Algeria, a rich and extraordinary music with very different influences (Ancient Rome, Byzantines, Arabic Andalusians, Islam). I made a video where I try to unite all these influences by talking about the music and musical instruments of Algeria.
Brady Walker: Can you tell me about how your composing career has intersected with other arts? You’ve composed for film and theater, for instance. I’d love to learn more about how your interests have cross-pollinated.
Robert Musci: I have been contacted, often to my surprise, by directors and choreographers who had listened to my music and wanted to use it for their films, video installations, or choreographies. I have worked (together with pianist Giovanni Venosta) with several Italian directors (Silvio Soldini), video installation studios (Studio Azzurro), and dance companies (Los Angeles Choreographers and Dancers).
I have also worked on live soundtracks for old silent films using electronic and experimental music.
In the mid-’90s, I read a book about the life and art of F.W. Murnau: 8 Uhr Abendblatt (1931).
I was struck by an interview with the director about sound in the movies. Murnau said, “It is too early for making audio movies; we have just started to explore the great possibilities that silent movies offer us, and now (1927) we are obliged to change our way of working for the words!”
This made me wonder what cinema would have been like if no one had invented spoken movies, allowing for a natural evolution of musical history. So, what happens if I watch a silent movie with experimental or electronic music for the soundtrack? I began experimenting with this mix.
Brady Walker: What kind of work would you have made had you been born 100 years earlier?
Robert Musci: I would certainly have been interested in chronophotography and Dadaist music.
“Chronophotography” is a work on images with digital algorithms, using filters of Quartz Composer, where the music modifies the speed and repetitions of the images. Chronophotography is a photographic technique from the Victorian era that captures multiple phases of movement.
Eadweard Muybridge and Étienne-Jules Marey are known for their pioneering work on human and animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, using multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-motion photographs. Muybridge’s zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures, predated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
I created a musical NFT entitled “Five Women in Dadaism.” The music was created using white noise modulations and singing bowls as the basis for original Dadaist poetry and music, recorded between 1916 and 1926 on 78 rpm records and remixed by an artificial intelligence music program.
What is your artistic lineage? Who are the artists you see yourself in conversation with?
Certainly the music that influenced me the most was that of King Crimson, Jon Hassell, Third Ear Band, minimalist music (Reich, Glass, Riley) and Indian music.
And all the sounds that I listened to during my travels.
Brady Walker: What art, books, music, and movies are you consuming lately?
Robert Musci: I am working on a video for Paola Fonticoli, an Italian painter-sculptor and model, very influenced by ethnic art. I have finished recording my latest album “Goodbye monsters”
I recently returned from Istanbul (my second home) where I studied (between a skewer, a Pide and a glass of Raki), Sufi music and culture (mystical current of Islam).
As for cinema, I am a sci-fi fanatic: any film that has spaceships or drooling alien monsters, I can’t resist, I have to see it.
