The Imagination Asks Questions: Giacomo Pedicini's Hard Boiled

Places of historical diversity seem to magnetize artistic innovation. In the Italian metropolis of Naples, where centuries of cultural collisions have left their mark on every stone and song, Giacomo Pedicini works in his Room999 Studio, making music to echo the city's inherent contradictions. The composer, bassist, and producer is a restless, creative spirit who moves fluidly between genres and artistic approaches. Each note emerges from a space where tradition and innovation dance their eternal waltz.

Pedicini’s double bass has resonated through Tokyo's Cotton Club and Barcelona's Forum De Las Culturas, leaving traces on countless recordings and in the scores of films directed by John Turturro, Viviana Calò, and Simonetta Rossi. Each collaboration—whether with electronic pioneers, jazz luminaries, or classical virtuosos—adds another layer to an artistic consciousness that refuses simple categorization.

His latest album, Hard Boiled, marks a decisive turn toward experimental territory. These provocative sounds emerge from a rich confluence of experiences with eleven tracks that defy the lines separating composition and pure sound exploration. The Italian song titles read like fragments of lost noir fiction—“Popcorn o Periscopi," "Prima di esplodere," "Sbucano dalle tubature”—and twist time into the elastic, stretching and contracting like the moments between thoughts. Though openly drawing inspiration from sources as diverse as Igor Stravinsky's revolutionary compositions, Charles Mingus's fearless innovations, and James Joyce's literary experiments, Pedicini has created something entirely his own. Hard Boiled represents a culmination—an artistic statement that transforms decades of musical wandering into a coherent yet challenging whole.

I recently spoke with Giacomo Pedicini to get a deep look (and listen) inside Hard Boiled, its various influences and intentions, and the impact of a life in Naples on his body of work.

Abandoning Memory

Michael Donaldson: The recording dates for Hard Boiled span from May 2022 to February 2023, with significant gaps between sessions. How did these temporal spaces between recordings affect the evolution of the music? Did the "narrative acoustic vacuum" you mention in the press release develop differently because of this extended timeline?

Giacomo Pedicini: This is how I had planned to work on it. I needed to abandon memory. For everything to be as visceral as possible, I had to forget any notes played previously and interact with the sound material at the precise moment of listening without knowing any sound from the previous take. A memory that does not remember. It may seem strange, but it's my way in this project to not "being played" but "playing." This is, for me, the “narrative acoustic vacuum."

Michael: You open the album’s press release with a quote from Bruno Maderna about the composer taking "the risk of freedom" and overcoming "the stage of sterility." How does this concept of creative risk influence Hard Boiled?

Giacomo: I'm glad you asked me this question because we mostly love quoting a composer’s ideas but do not put them into practice. We dedicate a conservatory or a street to them, but we don't go into the depths of their message. Some prefer to make them become museum objects rather than entities that still release energy because, in some way, they are uncomfortable and scary. However, composers from Stravinsky onward have truly developed the overcoming of the stage of sterility in music and art, inspiring other musical genres (jazz first) to abandon certainties and throw themselves into the free void of creativity. Regarding Hard Boiled, I perceived the risk from the first note. I sought this risk from the beginning, and it then enthusiastically pushed me forward. It was not a "Let's see what happens," but a "Let's make things happen."

Michael: You have an interesting history working with notable musicians. How did you approach Hard Boiled as a solo effort?

Giacomo: Hard Boiled was initially a side project. At the time, I was working on many different things. I decided to focus on my music and my free expression as a composer and musician. I didn’t know a priori where these ideas would land.

When Hard Boiled presented itself to me as a finished album, I started working in the same way on a small EP for solo electric bass that I distributed online, Hypothesis for a Memory. While it precedes the new one chronologically, this EP is a digression/variation derived from Hard Boiled. In the past, even having the fortune of working with international artists whom I admire greatly, such as Sting, Peter Gabriel, and José Feliciano, I now feel the need to embark on a personal path. I'm currently working on two new releases.

Michael: The album's conceptual framework seems to revolve around "primordiality" and "unconscious abandonment of rules." Yet you've worked extensively in structured environments with artists like, as you mentioned, Sting and Peter Gabriel. How does your experience in those more defined musical spaces inform or perhaps create productive tension with this freer approach?

Giacomo: If we look at things more broadly, I can tell you that even artists like Sting or Peter Gabriel work around the rules. Especially in cases like theirs, they have thrown themselves into solo careers, risking their livelihoods to look for a different path. You can interpret this creative breath as you like. And primordiality, in this case, is reflected in the abandonment of the most comfortable path and in regenerating from scratch. Nature moves in this way—every season, it regenerates itself. It seems like an excessively arrogant speech for a musician, but we must remember that as free composers, we carry this "sweet curse" on our shoulders. We should constantly try to go that extra inch as we grow as artists.

The Magic of Low Frequencies

Michael: What drew you to the bass and double bass?

Giacomo: I was influenced by music and the magic of low frequencies at a young age. It was rock and all its nuances that brought me closer to music, and I think that in Hard Boiled, you can hear them in some way.

Michael: Then how did you go from rock music to the music you are making now?

Giacomo: I had a 360-degree musical education. I studied classical music, jazz, and composition and had the fortune of playing in various musical genres, always absorbing everything with great respect. Now, it’s as if a circle is closing—all the studies and influences come back to me in the form of expressive freedom and artistic conception, a circle similar to the one Bill Evans describes in the liner notes of Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue.

Michael: Evans wrote about intuitive musical knowledge versus technical knowledge in those notes. How do these two forms of knowing interact in Hard Boiled? Are there moments where they clash or surprisingly align?

Giacomo: What Bill Evans wrote was an epiphany. I have to say that I discovered Bill Evans’s words thanks to Armando Pirozzi (who wrote the narrative text inside the CD on Hard Boiled). Well, Hard Boiled is exactly the image that Evans gives of it. As he says, "Erasures or changes are impossible. These artists must practice a particular discipline in such a direct way that deliberation cannot interfere." The moment I carefully read these words, I remember listening to the album again. Everything had changed. Everything was different.

Despite this, I prefer Coltrane and Adderley's solos in "So What." Academically, you study Davis's solo, but the humanity and truth breathed in the notes of two great artists like Coltrane and Adderley is impressive. It is a humanity that seeks in the moment—it does not want to "erase" or “change”; it just wants to find its place in space. Once again, we must look at things from a different or uncomfortable perspective. And if risk is the word we used for Hard Boiled at the beginning, I can confirm that the idea of the clash is intended to achieve alignment. The contrast is generative.

Michael: What was your intention with Hard Boiled? Do you feel like it is serving its purpose for you and others?

Giacomo: The idea of Hard Boiled developed and took shape in the final phase. I understood that I had worked primordially, considering music and overlapping sounds as a material that can be shaped, similar to a sculptor’s vision—music that occupies a time and a space and lets itself be carried away by the nuances of the moment. It is a memory that does not remember, a distorted but understandable language as expressed in the cover image of my father Gerardo and the internal text by Armando Pirozzi. This is also the reason for the name of the album: Hard Boiled as visuals for the ear.

Michael: That description—“visuals for the ear”—suggests a noir-like quality. How does this cinematic sensibility influence your compositional process? Does it relate to your work when scoring films?

Giacomo: A free composition’s visual or even cinematic element is very important. Since music is intangible, it needs a visual space when it is created. A single sound or a superimposition of sounds immediately creates an image in my head. When this image does not have well-defined contours, I understand it is the right path to follow. Because in a very modest way, I believe I am creating a small new microcosm.

When I write music for soundtracks, the image is already defined by the director and the editor. The sequences already have their time—you must follow a flow already implemented. In a certain sense, you work on something already "dead," in the sense of finished, while when I start from scratch, I can search for the "unfinished."

Arduous Shapes

Michael: The cover image by your father, Gerardo Pedicini, appears to be densely typed text in a frame. How does this visual representation of "distorted but understandable language" parallel your musical goals for the album? What conversations with your father might have influenced this connection between visual and sonic abstraction?

Giacomo: What I'm going to tell you is very personal, but it's very important for me to share it. This little work of art is called "Riflesso," which means reflection. It has been in front of my eyes since 1979 when I was six years old (so now I have also revealed my venerable age!).

The house where I grew up was small but covered with books, sculptures, and paintings, especially of the Neapolitan avant-garde. My father, an art critic and poet, was part of the emerging avant-garde movement in those years. So, my eyes as a child looked at these works, which were full of colors and arduous shapes, while I was probably playing with a toy train or watching cartoons on television. They were my landscape. And it was also the landscape in which my imagination asked questions.

My father never tried to influence me, not even when I decided to become a musician. We didn’t even have particular conversations about art. But he gave me the opportunity to listen. And for a musician, listening is always the most important thing. But it was not auditory listening but perceptive listening—listening with the eyes, with the heart, with the mind.

Among the many memories I have of this emotional growth, I remember these peaceful contrasts during the Christmas holidays. From a window in this small living room, I could see the Gulf of Naples and Vesuvius (Nature) and a Medieval castle (History). There were contemporary art paintings on the wall (Art), books overflowing from the library (Knowledge), my father working on the nativity scene with cork and papier-mâché (Tradition), and the music of Cavalleria Rusticana in the background (Pleasure). What a distorted clash!

Michael: It sounds like Naples directly influences your music.

Giacomo: It is impossible to remain strangers to the energy inherent in the Neapolitan territory. Surely, my music, like the music of many other musicians who live here, reflects that telluric movement driven by the stories of people and traditions. You cannot remain strangers to the relationship that the Neapolitan people have with the sacred. In a way, you have to listen to the layers of history that pile up here, one on top of the other. They can lead you to new, still unknown lands.

Michael: This "telluric movement” inspired by listening to “layers of history”—how does this geological metaphor of stratified time and culture translate into your approach to layering sounds in Hard Boiled?

Giacomo: It's a feeling. It's a distant nuance in Hard Boiled. It has much to do with the feeling that you can look elsewhere. As in most places in the south, the different layers of history have left something—the Sacred merges with the Profane. And the contrast and the clash generate creative sparks. We live, especially in this period, under the watchful eye of a still-active volcano. A volcano that, in destroying cities like Pompeii or Herculaneum, has preserved their History for us. And reflecting on your question, perhaps in Hard Boiled the destruction of a musical comfort could preserve the free creative act and the primordiality of sounds.

Giacomo Pedicini's is out now on Liburia Records. Purchase Hard Boiled from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice.