‘Click Interview’ with New Risen Throne: ‘I Didn’t Give Myself Deadlines’
NEW RISEN THRONE is an Italian project set up by Gabriele Panci aka ‘Stiehl’. The this year released album “The Outside” (Cyclic Law) marks the come-back of this artist. It is the first album since 2011 and the fourth chapter in a conceptual soundtrack, which took off in 2007 with the album “Whispers Of The Approaching Wastefulness” followed by “Crossing The Withered Regions” (2009) and “Loneliness Of Hidden Structures” (2011). The main idea is that ‘after centuries of isolation the human race begins a journey in search of the causes that led to the end of its world, and for the first time it approaches the Structures, new life forms that have developed and evolved in the emptiness of “The Outside”. The second disc features older tracks that have been remixed by other artists. Here’s what the artist has to tell us about this great work.
(Courtesy by Inferno Sound Diaries)
Q: “The Outside” is your first ‘new’ studio album since “Loneliness Of Hidden Structures” (2011). So what incited you to release new work? When did you start working on “The Outside” and what does this new album mean to you?
Gabriele: “The Outside” is part of a series of releases started in 2007 together with “Whispers Of The Approaching Wastefulness”, “Crossing The Withered Regions” and “Loneliness Of Hidden Structured”, so it is the closing of a particular story that I carry in my mind for almost 13 years. For years now I have been very busy with my work, so I don’t have all the time I had in the past to devote myself to music, but even if in the last 9 years I have not produced anything (except a digibook with old works restructured for Infinite Fog Prod.) I still continued to work on this last chapter and only released it when I felt like I had created something worthwhile.
Q:. I think we can speak about a real conceptual work, which seems inspired by sci/fi and still a dystopian vision of the future. Tell us a bit more about it? What are the main themes and sources of inspiration?
Gabriele: Yes, as I told you, the four albums are to be considered as the chapters of a single story, just as one might think of the subdivision of a book into chapters or the different books that form a saga. For the first two albums, the story is to be considered in an embryonic, purely conceptual state… except for the cover, everything else is left to the listener’s imagination and interpretation. For the last two, however, I gave a clear line of interpretation, imagining precise environments and events. So I went from talking about a topic common to all, the awareness of the end and its imminent arrival in a purely conceptual key, to telling the journey of men in a destroyed world to look for the causes that led to its end. For this last chapter I have been inspired by novels by Dick, Asimov, Clarke and I am creating a virtual reality experience for it.
Q: Can you tell us the different stages you’d to go through to achieve “The Outside”? what have been the main difficulties and maybe challenges you encountered in the writing process?
Gabriele: First of all for “The Outside” I didn’t give myself deadlines, as evidenced by the fact that it came out 9 years after “Loneliness Of Hidden Structures”, so any difficulties related to the creation of an album have been bypassed or resolved with tranquility simply by putting aside the rush. The compositional process was more or less this: I started by writing the story, dividing it into the highlights in order to create the tracklist and finally I started composing the music so that it represented them in the best possible way.
Q: Different details in the production make me say you’re a real ‘fetishist’ when it comes to sound- and noise treatments/manipulations. How do you proceed to create all these sounds and do you handle specific criteria to get the ‘right’ sound, noise or effect?
Gabriele: I think that over the years, my music has undergone an evolution both in the stylistic form and in the ‘quality’ of the sounds. Unlike the previous albums, in which there was a prevalence of medium / low frequencies and it was all exclusively ‘synthesized’, in “The Outside” I tried to range a lot even between the high frequencies and I used more classical instruments, such as guitar and percussion. From the stylistic side, in each album the melodic component becomes more and more present and important, but also the presence in some pieces of distortion and rhythmic parts that bring it closer to death-industrial than to the dark-ambient. In the last album this evolution is certainly more evident.
Q: It doesn’t happen very often a dark-ambient artist is releasing an extra album with remixes. How did you get the idea and what can you say about the featured artists, the job they did and the result?
Gabriele: In recent years I have attended some European festivals and have had the pleasure playing with some excellent artists of the genre. With these there was certainly an exchange of know-how as well as friendship, so I thought I’d to involve some of them in this latest work and one of the ways to do it was to ask them for remixes of my old pieces. The work they did was great.
Q: The Covid 19 pandemic could have been a great theme for a sci/fi and/or dystopian theme, but it’s reality! Italy is one of the countries that have been deeply affected. What are your feelings about it as Italian citizen and as music artist?
Gabriele: Without a doubt, Italy was the country hit hardest by the virus immediately, we have seen collapsing hospitals, endless rows of coffins, pain, lockdowns. As a citizen, the first thing that comes to my mind is that ‘we’ underestimated the problem from the very first signs. In a few weeks the evolution of the phenomenon was very fast so we went from underestimating the virus (sometimes joking about it), to being afraid of the virus and finally getting used to the virus (I remember how the daily appointment with the number of deaths was at the end becoming a kind of lottery draw). As a musician I didn’t have any inspiration from the period, my last album came out a month before the problem started and during the whole lockdown I didn’t create anything in that sense.
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