Electro-ambient music made of synths, piano and drums for a deep inner journey through physical and mental space of the listener. This is Nebula, the new album by Pulsar, the audiovisual solo project of the electronic musician and drummer Leonardo Pucci, out now on vinyl and digital via Rous Records.
According to the Italian composer, based in Foligno: “The album is called Nebula, and it was written and recorded between March 2020 and June 2021 during the period of lockdown, while we all felt lost, floating beings in limbo. The writing for this album was inspired by these sensations, and I wanted to describe them through a journey inside a nebula. Initially overwhelmed by the beauty of the giant molecular cloud and its cosmic elements, your thoughts move to something more familiar, the Earth. Through primordial memories, the waves, the clouds, the wind, you realize that there is nothing more beautiful than our planet, and that is why we must respect and preserve it“.
Nebula is a record characterized by a strong duality, starting from its title with a double meaning, relative to both that of nebula and that of cloud: the first three pieces in the tracklist, with a more electronic imprinting, are related to Space, while the next five were created starting mainly from acoustic instruments and a more melodic approach, placing themselves in proximity to an imaginary connected to the Earth.
Former drummer of Espada and Danny Mellow, as well as one of the founders of the Holydays Festival, Pucci started his solo project Pulsar in 2015, when he developed his passion for electronic music and synths, as well as for a certain type of sound language similar to names such as Ólafur Arnalds, Nils Frahm and Rival Consoles. Nebula follows the more rhythmic debut album Empty – released at the end of 2018, always by the independent label Rous Records, managed by a collective of musicians that includes Pucci himself – and presents itself as a more thoughtful and at the same time softer, lighter and more enveloping work, thanks to live experiences and the use of the acoustic piano that pushes everything in a modern classical direction. This time all the tracks were recorded with real instruments and effects, gravitating with a “human” sound around the electro-ambient satellite but also floating on psychedelia and Kosmische Musik, progressive and free jazz influences. “I have always liked to think of music as a means of communicating what otherwise I would not be able to express with words. My records are the transposition of my sensations into music, as if they were the soundtrack of what goes through my head“.
Nebula was entirely written and performed by Pucci, with the participation of Laura Agnusdei on the saxophone in three tracks, including the title track chosen as first single. “Nebula represents well the whole album and is placed between its electronic soul and the acoustic-melodic one“. The track consists of irregular loops of various instruments: a piano prepared with a brass bell, a guitar played with a bow, the inevitable synthesizers, Agnusdei’s saxophone and an Indian Harmonium that grows gradually its intensity. The related videoclip was shot and edited by Alessandro Sforna and stars the dancer and choreographer Lucia Guarino.
The second single Distant Waves is the first track that was written for the album and is also the one that then guided the full creative flow. The song begins with a synth texture that sounds like the waves and intensifies more and more until it leads to a hypnotic 80s-style arpeggio. The video of this track, featuring the dancer Veronica Biondini, was shot and edited by Pulsar. “Combining music and dance was an experiment. I believe that my music is related to images and that dance as an expression of the body is very close to what I try to convey with sound. Also, I enjoyed collaborating with other artists, and find out how they would react to my compositions“.
Sound astronaut, and architect and designer in his everyday life, Pulsar has even created by himself the artwork of the record, adding geometric stylizations to some satellite photos. “The leitmotif of my project is Space, intended as an attractive journey into the unknown. The name Pulsar refers to a neutron star that emits electromagnetic radiation: the pulsations generated from its rotation are transformed also in sound. My first album Empty, which also contained some sounds made available by NASA, was the start of this journey, and Nebula is now developing it. Will it continue? Will there be an end? Probably yes, but I don’t know yet – we’ll find out“.
