ATARAXIA are a few Italian artists who explore and create music, poetry, theatre and photography and who have dedicated their lives to art. We feel like pilgrims deeply influenced by our geographical and spiritual voyages in places still owning the nobleness of centuries. We have grown-up in a land that is a meeting point between the Mediterranean and Celtic cultures and we feel like wandering menestrels carrying the 'oral tradition' of early times. We define us as 'craftsmen of the sound' because we create an unusual mix of sacred and profane, atmospheric and experimental, contemporary and early music. We make researches into the European legends crossing the Greek and Latin myths. Contemplation, dream experiences, memories and ritual movements float in the magic garden of Psyche and Desire where new textures of notes meet the envelopping echo of classic sounds. Our peculiarity is composing both with acoustic instruments like classic guitar, chitarra battente, darabouka, tablas, tar and other percussions and electric ones like keyboards, sytnhs and drum pads. Our lyrics have been written in many old and contemporary languages, thanks to the charme and richness of different sounds and accents we try to bring to surface the hidden treasures and revelations that each idiom owns.

ATARAXIA best performances take place in fascinating natural or architectural environments where magic flows as it happened in the primordial drama. The stones and the water speak to us. During our live-acts we explore and travel with our listeners in primeval kingdoms, we paint with notes whimsical landscapes. We have a medianic attitude towards creation that's the way to express the divine substance enlightening the living beings, we feel like vibrating channels that can capture, transform and let flow outside the energy surrounding us.

I n   d e p t h

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Music

Keats wrote: "Art is beauty and beauty is art", the music instrument is just the practical means to make it sprout. We think that music exists to express what is not possible to be expressed by words, in this sense it's not completely human. We have never been interested in creating single tunes, we have always enjoyed telling stories. A song is like a powerful river that runs along our imagination till it can get a way to come out and start living outside us, among people. The majestic chorality, the soliloquies, the fairy-tales, the portrait of elegiac ages, the delicate vibrating airs, the marble sounds, the priestly movements are all elements of this fresco. Our inner landscapes become sound. Music is a deep esoteric experience; a powerful channel of communication between the living and the departed, the past and the present. Sometimes music is a sort of relief from suffering, we don't feel anylonger the weight of our body and the misery of our condition, music helps us to enjoy plenitude, it becomes an oasis of pure contemplation and makes us living a catharsis.

Lyrics

Our lyrics are inspired by the confidential nature of reflection, that is the man in front of the mirror of his feelings, remembrances, silences and spleen. We are the result of our experience and we can't prevent us from letting this flow of consciousness be the essence of our verses. Sensations, regrets and illuminations are embroidered in a game of sensuous images, a full immersion in a nocturnal blooming garden. Sometimes our lyrics are solemn epitaphs soaked with the gravity of latin sensitivity, other times are chromatic gradations, scented perfumes whose inspiration lies in mythology. We utilise many ancient, invented and contemporary languages (such as Latin, French, Italian, Spanish and English) creating suggestive effects thanks to the dilatation and distorsion of sounds and syllables. Words sound like magic spells. Music is a magic act. We own a bard spirit and this fluid is still flowing on our blood.

Love For Early Times

In our creative world the passion for Greek and Latin cultures has always had a great importance. Our aesthetic quest is led by the rich historical and cultural backgound that we have inherited. We are rings of a chain that preserves the past and gives it back to the present. We feel to be like sybils, mediums of history and time that utilize us to reveal some of their many voices.

Inspiration

We are aesthetes, we look for beauty, beauty in its sinister or solar connotation, the unexpected, the authentic and the universal one. Year after year, we have tried to express our vocation and this made us find our most courageous, pure and vital essence. Music helps us to evolve and improve. As human beings, our creative process has to start from our weakeness. To progress means to learn to express ourselves in a deeper, more nuanced and freer way. Thanks to music it is possible to live a deep communion with "the whole". Music is not palpable, material, you can't touch or see it but it enables you to develop a "deeper sight".We think that melancholy and struggle are essential to create and that music is made for moody tempers sharing climax of pain and creative inspiration. The musician is both a fragile and strong vehicle of electric turbulences.

We are deeply attracted by water, we feel the everlasting call of the sea, a fascination that it's not possible to explain by words but it's clearly perceivable in our music. There's an ancestral link between music and the sea. When you are set in front of the sea you're completely absorbed by it and you don't exist anylonger in this form, you don't feel pain, joy, emotions, you're completely filled by its murmur, its hypnotic sound. The sea empties then fills you again with his rhythm. The flowing of music and words is a sort of mantra that owns the same power of the sea. It is made of the same substance.

Our concept albums

Medieval and baroque airs, bohemien and experimental soundscapes, amplification of colours and forms, sequences of darkness and light, harmonies and babelic echoing; every album we create is a chapter of the same book, every new chapter begins where the previous ends.
Our first release was made of stone and marble, the second was inspired by water, then we afforded the 'seasons of the men', the melodrama, an eterodoxe and eccentric reinterpretation of the music of the XVII/XVIIIth centuries, we visited south Europe archeological sites looking for the myth of the sunken continent of Atlantis, we afforded a purificating voyage in far eastern lands to find again the roots of our existence. We met a woman and her spiritual guide, the Unicorn, portrayed in the tapestries of the Mediaeval museum of Cluny in Paris. They were there to reveal the beauty of spiritual love. We spent hours contemplating the white cliffs of Normandy whipped by strong winds and by the force of the Ocean, we rested in refreshing woods where our sleep was captured by the birds flight skimming over boundless flowery seas. We found relief in several gardens, places of harmony, prayer and contemplation. Then, through Baudelaire's verses, we explored Paris of the "cabarets macabres" and fun fairs where each gesture, tear, mask, and world turned into a grotesque and amplified representation of life. Lately, fascinated by Samothrace's full of energy sites, we sang lunar litanies and whispered magic spells in order to be initiated into the mysteries of the island and be allowed to enter the purple reign of the Goddess.

Live Performances

Our performances are usually based on a specific concept that we try to develop utilising several forms of expressions like music, poetry, photography and dance. For this reason, from the very beginning we have collaborated with a mime and a photographer who have taken care of our live performances. We have always given a multimedia connotation to our live acts creating adequated scenographies (with masques, costumes and symbolic objects) and a poetical background thanks to projections of films and slides. In the past we also worked with some painters. Whenever it's possible our concerts take place in fascinating environments like abbeys, castles, parks, courts, squares and old theatres. During our live acts all the senses are involved. We are not interested in music that can be consumed in a small number of listenings and we have chosen not to utilize basis and pre-recorded patterns in order to let emotion flow copiously outside.

The Voyage

The relationship with our time is based on the voyage and the discovery. Even if the time-space coordinates have changed, speed has shortened the stages and we are forced to be more superficial than our ancestors, we are not so different from the voyagers of early ages like Marco Polo or Vasco de Gama. Nowadays, trying to acquire self-knowledge through the sensible world costs great sacrifice and self-denial but we walk along a path that finds its origins in very far times. The Ancient Spirits are still speaking .