A process, not a band
Open to the Sea is a process, not a band. It’s not even a musical project, not in the terms we are used to consider this kind of collaboration among musicians.
Without any initial planning, Enrico Coniglio and Matteo Uggeri begun their collaboration in 2013 for the solo album of Matteo “The Next Wait” (released then by Infraction in 2019, when Enrico provided to him some and guitar organ lines for a couple of songs. Uggeri afterward processed such sounds and adding other ones, grabbing files from his hard drive, inviting vocalists to complete the songs and then mixing all together. Enrico appreciated this modus operandi at the point that proposed to Matteo to do a whole record together. That’s how the album "Open to the Sea" (Dronarivm, 2017), was born. |
Taking a name, then meeting
The further step was to consolidate the partnership between the two under a stable moniker, actually Open to the Sea, from the name of such first album.
Inviting collaborators, such as singers, was a intermittent practice, that found its acme in the third album, "Another Year Is Over, Let's Wait for Springtime" (Midira, 2020), where - beside Lau Nau, Animor, Jan Jun and other ones, a track is sung by Dominic Appleton of Breathless, whose amazing voice was borrowed to This Mortal Coil, the ‘superband’ of 4AD label. Combining ambient, melancholic melodies, unexpected noises and weird assemblies of strings, horns and drums, with occasional electronics, OTTS albums seems to find a sort of mixture between the mentioned 4AD ‘myth label of the eighties’ and the innovative jazz approach of ECM. But this combination is somehow the result of the regular process that the two musicians keep putting into practice. |
The OTTS steps to creativity
They met in person only once in their life, in Milan in 2014, for a large combo field-recordings improvisation organised by Die Schachtel. They sort to like each others, so they kept doing music together on a regular basis.
Enrico records his piano, guitar, organ and electronics in his home studio in Venice, ship digitally the whole thing to Milan to Matteo, that does the arrangements, adds instruments and invites other collaborators. Even the album and song titles are decided afterwards. The only exception so far is “Watering a Paper Flower” (Fluid Audio, 2021), an album where all the conceptual and semantic side was planned by Enrico (and Matteo still knows nothing about the semantic behind it). But the musical process was still the same. This album was released in such a handful of copies that had very little ditribution and no promotion, so it's still unknown to most of fans. |
The new musician arrives
The following album, “Tales from an Underground River” (ADN/Silentes 2022) pushes to the extreme the process, as the venetian musician recorded two long ‘impro-emotionally driven sessions’, and his peer in Milan rebuilt in the way we now know. But such a process needed to be scrambled at one point. That’s why Enrico involved Saverio Rosi, based in Amsterdam, in order to add a further, intermediate step between him and Matteo. Therefore Saverio played over Enrico’s sounds, then the whole thing, done again from a long distance, and without any physical meeting among the involved persons, was sent to Matteo. Saverio has a more 'jazzy' background, that drives the music of OTTS to new, unpredictable directions. |
The future?
Saverio's contribution at guitar, tapes, piano and electronics are integrated in the digital EP “Waterfall of Snakes”, included only in the very limited edition of the “Tales from…” CD, that includes a puzzle.
A further, more complex album with Coniglio/Rosi/Uggeri, named “Rooms by the Sea”, will be published in 2023 by Dissipatio and will bring the soul of Open to the Sea to a new shape.
A further, more complex album with Coniglio/Rosi/Uggeri, named “Rooms by the Sea”, will be published in 2023 by Dissipatio and will bring the soul of Open to the Sea to a new shape.