About

Nothence is a personal independent alternative-rock music project started by Fabio Scagliola in Lugano, Switzerland, in 2009. The fourth instrumental post-rock studio album Proposed tracks for unproduced movies was released on December 1, 2018. Fabio had previously released three other studio albums: his favorite one Post mortem memento vivere (September 1, 2016), Public static void (March 21, 2014), and Portrayed by a blind painter (October 1, 2012)

Learn more about Post mortem memento vivere on its mini website https://pmmv.nothence.com

Read more about Public static void

Read more about Portrayed by a blind painter

As he left grief, anger, and loneliness behind, with Public static void, second product of his personal music project, Fabio Scagliola puts down in music his effort to turn chaos into cosmos, to reorder the inner disorder, to reconcile himself with his world after the alienation.

Pacification, however, is not easy: if Portrayed by a blind painter had been a crude exercise of catharsis, this second album as well is an exercise. The scope of the themes developed in the songs gradually widens from the inside to the outside of the individual, to his interactions, to society, without giving up on an intimate and thoughtful approach. Softened by the use of the piano (and, on one track, of the organ), Public static void is definitely lighter to listen to, but not less profound. Sounds, along with choruses' melody, make it globally less rough.

Chaos and cosmos, disorder and order, confront, face each other, in search of harmony through contrasts.

This message is clear from the moment you hold the disc in your hand and look at the cover: the source code of a computer program on the front, and a data structure on the back. The front defines an algorithm to calculate the Fibonacci numbers; the back uses these numbers, so unexpectedly recurring in nature, to identify the tracks on the disc. The products of a disordered creativity are reduced to a rational order.

Opening the cover, black gives way to white and grays. The rigor of Fabio's professional world gives way to the chaos of his freehand drawings: twisted figures cling, sometimes disturbing, alongside a photograph of a child's eye. On the disc, a light bulb, albeit on, is not enough to illuminate the surrounding darkness.

Once you insert the disc in the player, if you had known the sound of the first work, you will be surprised by the short melody of the intro, played on the piano, admittedly inspired by Erik Satie's Gymnopédies.

However, it does not take long before the sonic contrast kicks in: Chasms' three-quarters riff attacks with arrogance, accompanied by its lyrics depicting a representation of Jung's collective subconscious and recalling the bulb on the disc in the verse «light's pulsating in the core, blinded by surrounding dark».

Outcast tells the evolution of a solitary man who, self-exiled from a hypocritical society whose principles, based on capitalism and consumerism, he does not share, seeks a balance between the risk of death from social starvation and a re-integration with a compromise.

The encounter between two lighthouses, thanks to an earthquake, is the expedient exploited in Lighthouses to describe the human condition between hope and optimism.

A severe attack of migraine that struck his son created in Aura the opportunity for Fabio to temporarily set aside his Dawkinsian atheism and shout at an absent god, and at a religion (very present instead) that uses fear and sorrow as means of control.

Mirror tells the story of a man who looks at himself in the mirror and yet does not recognize his own reflection, calling for a physical reunion with his alter ego at the cost of his life.

Existential questions and a pinch of determinism (if not resignation) are the foundations of Destination's lyrics, followed by the raw and nihilistic collage of Scraps.

Sevle tells the sad story of two "reversed elves": beings created in pairs, meant to attract one another as opposites, but doomed to eventually repel, consume, and annihilate each other when placed in close proximity.

Organ expresses the refusal to theism (and even deism) in favor of a super-organism embracing human existence, both physically and psychically, and manifesting itself in music.

The term Fugue indicates a compositional technique, as well as a psychiatric disorder causing an altered perception of reality; this song tells the story of a man who dissociates himself to escape into a protective dimension where he can be safe from the dangers of real life.

This music, which is not written to be sold (as every authentic music always is), recalls the Japanese art of kintsugi that involves welding broken pottery fragments with precious metals. The author tries to compose himself through music, writing the soundtrack of his life, in an attempt to gain control of his own destiny. Between rupture and integrity, scars emerge: golden imperfections from which a new beauty shines.

A crisis, as a turning point, is a time of opportunity for those who make it through discomfort.

Like never before, in moments of despair we can allow our butterfly to free itself from its chrysalis and spread its wings. Like never before, when we are caught in the deepest discouragement (Unable goes «I had to reach the bottom») and we have nothing left to lose, we can get completely naked, tearing away the clothes we wear in order to play our role in life.

Then we get back in touch with aspects of ourselves that were lying asleep, buried under piles of dismissed clothes, abandoned in the dressing room where we tried so many ones, in search of those that we believed would fit us best, so many that we cannot even remember what we look like when we are naked.

So, on the bottom of the lacuna of his crisis, Fabio Scagliola found that piano tune he had recorded in 1996 and now introducing Hand in hand, one of the most inspired tracks of Portrayed by a blind painter, the first studio album produced by his personal music project Nothence.

One winter night at the end of 2009, five friends got together in a rehearsal room in Lugano, Switzerland, to cover a few songs; Fabio is on the bass. On the third rehearsal session Fabio finds himself in company of Oscar Armanini, whom he switches role with (from now on Oscar is on the bass and Fabio on the guitar), and Francesco Sabatelli, sitting at the drums. Francesco and Oscar suggest that Fabio play his songs and they manage to overcome his initial resistance to share such a personal matter. On July 31, 2010, the first amateur recordings. Soon after, unfortunately, due to work engagement, Francesco has to leave the band, and the drumsticks pass into the hands of Rodolfo Wacker.

One year later, the time is ripe: Fabio calls his old friend and music producer Alberto Rapetti, under whose masterly direction, between April and August 2012, in Verona, Italy, they record the 15 songs (including the hidden track) that make up the first studio album by Nothence. Fabio plays guitars, bass, and piano, and he sings; Pietro Micheletti plays the drums.

Pietro is a current member of Nothence, together with Fabio's brother Massimo (bass), and Giorgio Marcolungo (guitar).

Portrayed by a blind painter is made available for streaming on September 1, 2012 (birthday of Fabio's son Matteo), published as a digital album on October 1, 2012 (birthday of his friend Herbert Jansen), and released as a CD on November 1, 2012 (birthday of his friend, and first Nothence drummer, Francesco).

Unable, the song that, better than any other, condenses the essence of Fabio's first independent production, is chosen as the first single extracted from the album. It inspires a video directed by filmmaker Luca Adami, published on November 23, 2012.

Started as a game, for Fabio the Nothence project becomes an extremely serious exercise of personal catharsis, soaked in a magma of literary, musical, and psychological elements.

The sources are a place for inspiration, but not for repetition; recognizable, but reworked; they are suggestions: riffs, distorted sounds, a couple of songs in 7/4; everything recalls grunge music, so much consumed during the formative years.

The songs on Portrayed by a blind painter tell the descent of a modern Orpheus into his personal Hades, to sing his grief, his anger, his loneliness. But the tale is modern, the metamorphosis is no longer that of Ovid, but one that, even before you start listening to the album, is returned by the self-portrait on the back cover: among the tears, "something" emerges, comes out, comes to light, reborn.

Through the grief and anger cried in It hurts and Unable, the loneliness sung in Alone and Empty room, the questions without answer of Where are you? and Who am I?, we relive the crisis. However, like in every actual crisis, there is evolution, there is hope: The sun is coming back are the words written by Matteo for his father to sing them.

It is a hard, merciless music; it gives no discounts; it does not come to terms with a mainstream audience; it is intimate and touching; and that is why everyone can reflect in it like in a mirror for black days, knowing that behind the clouds the sun will still be there.

In May 2013, Fabio returns to the studio, once again under Alberto's invaluable guidance behind the control room glass, to begin recording the second album, despite the origin of the name Nothence, which conceals the initial purpose: it should have been "the nonce", which in cryptography indicates a number used only once, later anagrammed to "nothence" after a typo.