[ENG] When the inedia wore me out

26 May, 2026

On the genesis of the lyrics

Trying to talk about this track is honestly pretty complicated for me. Its roots are strange, the kind that keep growing and growing, dug deep into mother earth, impossible to pull out. Then you slowly forget about them because it is like that mix of silt, sand, and clay created a blanket, a sort of mental humus that clouds what you lived through, and only a memory can bring it back up to the surface.
Well, yeah, that memory floated back up this year. I was rummaging through my stuff, scattering loose papers, notebooks, and planners from a lifetime ago. I stumbled upon an old journal, one of those ones you buy and start writing random things in, only to abandon it because writing by hand gets tiring, slows down your rhythm, traps your thoughts, and weighs down your grammar. So you leave it behind, not having really put anything major on paper, just some thoughts, a book review, a few aphorisms, and some poems.
One of them caught my eye as I was flipping through the worn-out pages, and my focus locked onto the ink smudges and crossings-out, all strictly in black ink. Being left-handed, my brain figured it would stain the paper less.
The text was pretty messy. You know, like the stuff teenagers write. The greatest poem in the world! I probably told myself back then. To be honest, I can't say it was really that bad.
So I decided to grab that notebook and violently rip the page out to transcribe the poem, trying to polish it, to make it more mine, more adult, and closer to who I am today. Then, reading it over and over and over again, a question popped into my head that hadn't even crossed my mind until then: how was it born? Why did I write it?

the transcription is even more messed up than the original. But it is a fun way to turn a poem into a song.

You know, when you are sixteen, you go through so many transitions, and everything you experience feels so foolishly important. As the years roll by, all that is left is a bittersweet, heavy nostalgia for what used to be: you feel everything so intensely, foot on the gas, no brakes, and all you want to do is swallow life whole, with all its love, its friendships, but also its conflicts, both with yourself and with everyone else.
I don't think I actually lived through all of that, apathy wore down almost my entire youth. I always hid away in writing, hoping to reject this life. You might think this was all part of an identity crisis, but looking back, I am not so sure if that was really it. Is deterioration truly a form of conflict? I don't know if what decays inside can spill over into something else, I see it more like a crushing of your own spirit and body, where everything compressed leaks out and never goes back to its original state. I think I wrote that poem specifically to compress the life that was happening around me. The text is so rarefied yet visceral, leaving no room to breathe, doing nothing but throwing a sense of unease right at you.

The song in italian lyrics go like this :

Sia quel che sia
non cambia niente
non sei mai stato
un uomo buono
Ovunque vaghi
sei di ritorno
torno bambino
non lo sopporto
E brucia la gola
anche se io
bevo la luce
e svanirò
nel cuore
ogni graffio
ogni schiaffo
lava il fondo
di una vita
scura e assente
lava l’urto
senza pelle
senza noi
Ascolta
il mio vuoto
Resta il silenzio
anche se io
non ho un corpo
non ho più fiato
non ho voce
E brucia la gola
anche se io
bevo la luce
e svanirò
nel cuore
ogni graffio
ogni schiaffo
lava il fondo
di una vita
scura e assente
lava l’urto
senza pelle
senza noi

I will skip the meaning of the lyrics, it would be really silly of me to give you a paraphrased breakdown of a song. It would feel like questioning the intelligence of anyone listening to the track or simply reading the words. I trust your inner world, your own feelings, hoping that a part of me resonates within you, because I believe that more than anything else, that is what words are for, to bridge distant worlds and bring them together.
No, what I really want to dive into is how my head comes up with the meaning behind making a song.

On the production of the song

It is no coincidence that I used the word meaning for how I make music. First off, before starting this blog, I constantly asked myself how I could ever explain to someone how I feel when I compose, arrange, and lend (painfully, I admit) my voice to my lyrics. Making videos to explain technical stuff just to please beginners or people stepping into production has never interested me. I can't even replicate the same mixing and mastering chains on every song I make. So what advice could I really give? Plus, there is no universal rule, nothing is absolute, especially in mixing. On top of that, being a synesthete completely complicates my entire approach to production. And talking about synesthesia in a mess of video clips, in my opinion, doesn't make much sense. How could I ever tell a viewer that to sample a sound, I need to see it first? And how do I show them that? Only words have that power, and that is why I started this space.

demonstration project of the song shown on Logic Pro.

Every single sound, whether sampled or not, mixed, and twisted in the song always has a deep connection to synesthesia. Without it, I would probably struggle to create a song because sounds emerge visually, and only sight brings fulfillment to music.
The song is intentionally slowcore , to emphasize the raw, visceral neglect of the lyrics: slow, purposely suspended, with a dusty rhythm that only kicks in around the chorus and builds up towards the very end, with a tired, slow, raspy, and deep voice, shaky at times. Maybe these sounds are almost entirely foreign to the Italian music scene, but I kept seeing this waterfall of sand driving the sounds, and this kind of approach came out:

1. Pad : This is what you hear at the start of the track. When I built it during the mix, I saw an oscillating, vibrating movement, with a dense grain like a slightly ruined film reel. Playing it in E minor, the image that hit my eyes was a tired sunset, I could see the sun dipping, floating in a circular way. This kind of association stands out especially when the sonic dimension cuts across the key of the track.
2. E-bow Guitar : I use an e-bow on the guitar quite a bit. I love the electric sound of the strings touched by that bow. The sound that clashes with the pad is exactly an e-bow. When I move it, I often see the air turn a purplish color that gets deeper every time I lighten my grip on the strings. Doing this makes the air move upward, and the sound shapes itself toward the listener's head. But that feeling only lasts until I start vibrating the strings, then the sound drops down to your feet, getting unstable, like walking on sand where the mass gives way to sound waves.
3. Synths : I don't usually sample synths or build them from scratch, I pick them thinking that the synth sound needs to open up the color of the track. You can find them in the bridge. They absolutely have to start from the bottom and dig right into the center of your body. It is not the kind of punch a drum kit gives, no, it doesn't hit hard, but it gently shakes the sounds, creating cracks of light that spread out to the sides of the soundstage, both left and right. This burst and buildup of pulse points directly toward the final guitar of the song.
4. Drums : These are the ones tired from the journey. When I use drums, I always feel inadequate, because they remind me of the earth shaking. Something that absolutely has to blast your eardrums and pump at full blast. The drums I sample are usually the opposite of what you would expect: dusty, lacking any lightness or grit, dragged along, bored, because that is what the earth reminds me of: when your feet are tired from a lifetime of walking, but it still has moments of fleeting peace, and this peace is fully immersed toward the end of the track, when the cymbals join the rest of the drums and create a hypnotic movement along with the piano.
5. Piano : I didn't play this myself. It follows a final arpeggio, but the mixing of the piano is my doing (meaning the sonic texture, for the non-technical folks). It is also dragging and hypnotic but dual, because it has counterpoints bouncing off the low, heavy arpeggio. Sometimes the piano doesn't trigger any synesthesia for me, which is why I almost never play it because I wouldn't know how to navigate it.
6. Distorted Guitar : This comes in gradually toward the finale. The guitar is my main instrument, maybe the only thing I can play halfway decently, I gotta say. This time I was thinking of a ping pong ball bouncing and hitting a table. The initial slide was what best matched that image, but then you know how that ball goes crazy and has no fixed spot to bounce, so it unleashes, goes wild, rolls, and hits everywhere it can. And that is what happens to my guitar, suddenly, it becomes a wild wall of sound. Then, in my eyes, I see all these rough needles, like pine needles, and I could taste wood in my mouth. A really unusual feeling, I must admit.
7. Voice : I am no singer, but I can more or less modulate the sound of my voice based on what I want to express. It can be a strength, or a massive flaw. I could go on forever about vocals, but insecurity would just give me a headache. And when I use it on my tracks, I don't get positive images. It reminds me of everything I am and everything I am not. Better to leave it alone, right? Either way, it is guttural, decaying, and not very explosive, the lyrics demanded it, and I tried to follow the philosophy of the text.
   

This is pretty much the sonic journey of this song in a nutshell. Yeah, a nice sonic journey, right? Reclaiming the meaning of the path feels interesting to me. If listening on bandcamp isn't convenient for you, you can always listen to the track right here on youtube while you dive into this read:

Cheers!

#burnout #creativity #life #maturity #music #music producer #writing