"My father is, as he likes to say, a full blooded Sicilian; my mother is from Switzerland. I was born in California and came to live in England age 14. Just how, or even whether, all this impacts on my work is not clear to me. Certainly the to-ing and fro-ing across the Atlantic throughout my teens and frantic ping pong games with my childhood friend Willo find some resonance here.

Naturally there were also some years of musical training - particularly, towards the end, in the electronic music studio at Sussex University. I especially remember the day Jonathan Harvey showed us how to splice tape. He picked up a length of quarter inch and waving it gently in the air said, this is the sound. Something struck me then about the physicality of the sound object - of music itself?

Anyway, I usually like to begin using 'concrete' sounds and voice. I am attracted to sound, not quite for its own sake, but for the meanings and structural potential it contains. The wider imperative, perhaps, being to make continuities between the physical world and the music.

Music to me is never an abstraction: of necessity it's an extension of lived, and heard, experience."


more info:www.soundcell.net/ficarra