In a certain sense, the music of twenty-eight-year-old Tommaso Pandolfi, aka Furtherset, is a cathedral: it surrounds you, overwhelms you, and intimidates you. Above all, listening to his music means getting lost and then finding yourself in a sharp, almost blunt, certainly extreme ambient sound: songs in a zero gravity situation, between vintage Tim Hecker, the solemnity of GAS, and shoegaze drifts by Jefre Cantu-Ledesma. With his new album The Infinite Hour, Furtherset talks about himself and his demons. C41 presents The Streams of Time on Stone Dreams single official video together with a conversation with the artist himself.

Manfredi Lamartina: Some time ago, in an interview with the New York Times, Hecker posed an observation that deserves to be explored further: “What is the function of music? Is it to serve as a background for a WeWork, efficiency world, for someone who just wants to code? Or is it for driving down a foggy road at night, wanting that experience amplified?”. Therefore, what is the function of your music?

Tommaso Pandolfi: An artist never wants to become a background for someone else. In music, I try to convey emotions I can’t channel in any other way, and I don’t even try to define them clearly. Sound is a mystery that the listener must then translate.

ML: Is that truly a mystery rather than an answer?

TP: I don’t aim for clarity but for questions. Answers can be very dull. Often, the questions are answers themselves.

ML: Where does your album title The Infinite Hour come from?

TP: The title comes from a poem by Amelia Rosselli, even if the meaning differs from the original sense. I was interested in this sort of cyclicality, infinity both as a point of arrival and as an infinite and endless circle, that is impossible to reach.

ML: There is this one track entitled Circulata Melodia which explicitly recalls Dante Alighieri. How come?

TP: The expression Circulata Melodia comes from a soundtrack of Artavazd Pelechian’s film Our Century projected last year at the Teatrino of Palazzo Grassi in Venice. That title doesn’t come from me but from a close collaborator of mine.

ML: So there is no actual reference to Dante?

TP: There is a melodic cyclicality, which is what the title refers to. Sometimes, it takes me weeks to find the right title; I edit songs’ titles more than the music itself.

ML: You claim that you feel a “deep sense of loss listening to this music”, to quote you. What do you mean by “loss”?

TP: I’m not particularly eager to go into detail because it takes away the listener’s possibilities of interpretation. At the beginning of the pandemic, a time that impacted me as everyone a lot, as other periods have over the years. I wanted to reflect on these things.

ML: Do you feel emotionally vulnerable when you listen to and play these songs?

TP: I stick to Scott Walker’s school: I listen to my songs once when they’re finished, and then I never do it again.

ML: Why?

TP: It’s a way that allows me to forget the original form to rework it in another way when I play live, based only on my memories. In general, I don’t need to listen to what I do. I prefer to spend time on other people’s records.

ML: Can you be emotionally detached when you play?

TP: I’m always emotionally detached from what I do.

ML: How did you work on the sound of the album?

TP: I tried to think of everything in a more symphonic way than in the past. There is a lot of intensity and moments with less concentration of elements, although they always seem to be highly dense compositions. I tried to do something more symphonic. And spooky, yes.

ML: A few years ago, they described you as the child prodigy of Italian electronics. Now that you’re still young but of course older than before, do you feel like you’re dealing with more expectations than you did back then?

TP: If there were expectations, I betrayed them by disappearing for years. I’m no longer on all that stuff, as I used to be. The only thing that matters is making art without thinking about expectations.

ML: Do you feel freer now?

TP: I have always been. Until 2015, I was behind certain things that the music press said about me, and then I took a break. I live in Venice, I’m out of everything, I don’t know how to deal with these things. I live locked in the studio all the time.

ML: What’s your opinion about AI? Is it a threat or an opportunity?

TP: The video for The Streams of Time on Stone Dreams is made with AI-generated images. It’s an infinite stream, twenty images per second. I used AI because I was interested in doing so. It’s a tool, and it’s neither good nor bad. I don’t understand the enthusiasm or even the criticism.

Furtherset is the musical project of artist and musician Tommaso Pandolfi. His compositions’ distinctive traits are stratifications and recursive shifting modulations, synthetic clusters, and sampling, alongside rhythmic and embracing harmonies. The project is envisaged as formal research that follows a path towards saturation and layering but is always capable of generating voids in which the listener can take their place and fill them according to their own focus.