Adepts of the Sun craft immersive live experiences where ancient rituality meets modern sound. Blending electronic music with deep meditative atmospheres, they draw inspiration from artists like Shabaka Hutchings and Thom Yorke to create a space for reflection and emotional release. With Piero Conte on guitar and SP-404, Benjamin Ventura on keys and sub-bass, and Davide Savarese on drums and SPD, the trio transforms performances into collective rituals. We caught up with Piero Conte, the mastermind behind this new project, before their show to dive into their unique sonic world.
Adepts of the Sun is a new project that I made. And I started writing this music, about six to eight months ago. And today is the first time that we play, so I'm very excited about that. I had the luck and the chance to bring two musicians from Italy: Davide Savarese and Benjamin Ventura. It's kind of a big thing for me, because they inspired me a lot when I was younger. It's kind of the first time that I had a chance to bring them into my own project, although we worked together in the past already. In this session, we're going to play five songs full of electronics, sampling and looping sequences. The idea was trying to blend improvised parts together with this kind of electronic mood, which is harder to put as freely as when you play your instrument.
I'm really happy that they made it. And I think there weren't so many other players that could have done this kind of work in two days, coming from a different place, rehearsing twice, and doing the live show. There are also two featuring artists, Fenne Scholte and Diana Dzhabbar. Fenne is going to sing on one song that I wrote together with Gita Buhari, actually. Diana is going to play the flute. She's subbing for Fanni Zahár, who was also supposed to fly in, but she's super busy, so she couldn't make this one. But I'm really happy with Diana. She's amazing. Great vibe.
How do you feel in this current chapter of your life, in your music, in your art?
So this is the third project of my own. Actually, the second, but I started another thing a while ago. It was playing, arranging, and writing a bit for the singer RBSN from Italy. That was also the first time I've played with Davide and Benjamin. That was my first experience. Then I started a new band when I arrived in Amsterdam, called Antares Flare. It was something that came out of my jazz studies, and passion for jazz music. There's already a bit of synths and electronics in it. Later I joined the project from Rome, called Sinnerman. That gave me a lot of insight and knowledge on electronics, live sample, live electronics, blending live music and live electronics. It's been a while that I play mainly with these two bands. And I write for them. Both bands are rolling, it's kind of an autopilot thing. By now we know how to work together, we already made a few records...
I felt like it was time to come with something new. I always had this blend of jazz and electronics in mind, but I felt that I didn't have enough knowledge about electronics yet. And now, thanks to Sinnerman and especially the leader of the band, Dario Castelli, I got some new insight and started writing. All of a sudden, it was all fitting together. Somehow this sound that I managed to put in the pre-prods, the demos I was making, felt to me like something where all the parts that I always liked in music came together. I'm really excited and looking forward to new things with Adepts of the Sun.
How would you describe the sound of Adepts of the Sun?
I would pick three words: "dark", "dub" and "rituality". The dark part is within the sound, which wasn't planned. I wasn't really planning to do something dark. It just came out that way. It might relate to the place where I come from, Rome. It's a place with a lot of extremes. The structure of the city doesn't really work, but at the same time, it's also one of the most beautiful places I've ever seen. And so within the Roman people you develop this kind of irony of like making fun of this darkness. Another thing is more personal. I haven't always been in an amazing place with my mental health, so I think that felt into it when I started writing this music. I was already coming out of a long process through therapy and meditation, and several different tools that helped me get out of that mental space. Since 2020, the world we live in is in a very specific place. It's incredible how much is happening around the world that's not pleasant. I don't know, it feels like it's a very peculiar moment in history, especially being part of it. The succession of all these negative events also influenced me in a way subconsciously. I didn't have the goal to express it in the music, I guess it just came out like that.
The dub part is more of a musicality thing that I discovered together with Sinnerman. From there, I started listening to bands like Holy Tongue, Sons of Kemet, this kind of dub influenced music like Massive Attack... I knew them from before, but I kind of rediscovered them in this time.
I love the way jazz, dub and electronics work together. I'm not sure why, but to me the sound feels really relatable.
Tijmen de Nooy Photography
The rituality is part of the concept of the band that lays in the looping and repeating part of the music that gives you this rituality atmosphere. Like I was saying, it's about the rituality and the idea that nowadays, or at least here in Europe, it's something that kind of disappeared over the years. It's been a while since religion kind of lost its main grasp on the majority of Western societies. And I think that it's a bit weird that the rituality didn't come back, and we still see the rituals as something that relates to religion, gods, cults, or just weird people doing weird things in weird places, I guess. But it's not like that, and it didn't use to be like that before church took over. I think the importance of rituality, the importance that it had in the society was to be in contact with your feelings and emotions that we don't like to look at, or stay with. Very often, the rituality was something that would give space to that, and allow you to stay with it, to stay with your sadness and not be scared of it. Knowing that everybody has those feelings, and it's pointless to avoid them, or sweep them under the rug. Because they only grow bigger and bigger, we don't know how to treat them, and it gets harder and harder. I have this feeling that in the society, or in my daily life at least, it sometimes feels like you're not allowed to express your sadness, because you're a bummer, or it breaks the vibe, and nobody wants to hear about that.
Music has this kind of magic to give us a chance to sit in that space together with other people in a way that's also not too direct, so you can choose how much you want to deal with that side.
So this was what came up while I was writing the music, and something I'd like to develop, but I still have to research the topic a bit. And the name? I thought about the word Adepts. Originally, the idea was "Sons of the Sun", but there was already a band called that, and it's kind of a cliche, many bands are called that by now. "Adepts", is one of those words that is immediately related to a cult, a religion, or a sect, so bringing it into a band that doesn't have any relationship with that kind of thing is completely the opposite. We might demystify the term itself, let's see if it works.
What's in store for Adepts of the Sun in the near future?
So far I've written five songs. In January I have some time to dive in and write five more, I'm already looking forward to it. I guess the next big thing is going to be the recording, the first recording of our first LP. And I'm still thinking about the best way to do it, but I would love to record it as a live show for example with some figures on stage, things that we put on stage to draw attention away from us, so that we can become a part of the show itself.
Most of the time, when you see a concert, there's a gap between the crowd and the stage, and the people that are performing. I've been trying to look for ways to reduce this gap.
Another one of the next things I'm going to start to work on is the visual identity of the band. I'm still looking for a graphic designer that can match my idea of the music. So mainly these two things, let's see where we end up.
Is there anything else you’d like to share?
I would like to thank you guys, and everybody that made it possible. The studio, the featuring artists, Steppin' Into Tomorrow, Amarte, all the people that took part in the making, and I'm really grateful to be part of this series.
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