Sleepstream #1
About two records, MP3s at internet cafes and an island.
I spent quite a while wondering if it made sense to write this, and what kind of reaction it could possibly get. I tried to put myself in your shoes - maybe right now you’re thinking something like: “Let me see if I remember who this guy calling himself April Clocks even is…”
At this point, someone has probably already scrolled to the bottom to unsubscribe or close the page. That’s totally fine.
For those of you still reading, I want to make something clear: there’s no editorial plan behind this. Just a very personal - and maybe slightly selfish - need to reach out.
For those who don’t know, my name is Danilo Betti, and the April Clocks project was born in 2014 with Due Lune, the first cassette released on my own label and record store, Mixed Up. Since then I’ve made three albums, the latest one being Rituals, described as “a digital tapestry that flows and grows progressively until it reaches a sense of losing proportions.” Those words, written by Claudia Durastanti for Internazionale in January 2024, dug deeper into the essence of what April Clocks represents to me than almost anything else.
I’ve always believed that artists are basically selfish creatures. Sometimes lacking empathy, sometimes lost between peaks of narcissism and valleys of depression where we pitch our tents and warm ourselves by the fire for days, weeks, months. April Clocks has lived inside that reality since its beginning, and right now feels like the right moment to open up its world a little. Still hidden, still protected, but not absent.
The idea that artistic storytelling should only pass through an avatar shaped by social media strategies and stylistic filters… it crushes me. It flattens everything that actually matters behind this project - which has nothing to do with any of that. What has always moved me is reading, watching films, experimenting with instruments, keeping this quiet nerdy attitude behind everything. Sometimes I still buy records, even though I have to admit those recent studies claiming that people over 30 stop listening to new music are painfully accurate. If you’re a musician concerning about your own integrity, I feel that effect is even stronger.
The same goes for how I consume information, and for what I choose - when I manage to resist the urge to scroll nonsense on my phone.
In the last week, there were two long-form pieces that made me want to sit down and write all of this. (*both links are linked below)
The first was Liz Harris’ debut post on Substack. Grouper: I’m sure a good portion of you still reading at this point at least vaguely knows who she is.
Liz wrote about the creation and the early years of Way Their Crept (her 2005 debut, just reissued by Kranky for its 20th anniversary), giving a glimpse of that world - the American underground - strange and somehow charming in its sincerity and lack of construction. Even the parts about her social life, her jobs, her parties, that feeling of simply “being in it”, without spectacle, without drama… it’s something I feel we’ve lost. That was something you cannot see in those days as user, when we all used to find stuff on blogs and relied on scarse or none informations.
It hits me because I don’t have a story like that.
My background, my hometown, my origins - they’re too far from that paradigm. On paper I was born lucky, I won’t lie. Not rich in an economically way, but surrounded by stuff and curiosity. I dragged my passion for music making one step after another, not knowing anything but what was coming into my ears. My parents used to put me to sleep with Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Led Zeppelin. I grown up with a turntables, with cassettes.
My privilege was that I was able to carry on buying records myself, and have time to consume them, with friends, and alone. But at some point that was a routine I’ve run away from all that more than once, searching for something more.
I’ve been asking myself too many questions, and I’m still battling this familiar sense of falling short.
The first time I ever thought about this project, and about the name April Clocks, was in 2008, in a hostel room in Sydney. At that time I was just making my first music experiments with a cracked copy of Sony ACID, not even knowing I was allowed to change the default 120 bpm project tempo. Proper amateur, I reckon.
Anyway, Australia - I had one week left before going home after a 10-month working holiday visa. I was reading Orwell’s 1984 for the first time, and even though I already knew the plot and its impact on dystopian literature, my reaction was different: I felt like I was holding a love story more than a political warning in my hands. I thought that because I had run away to Australia after a life that had just fallen apart - addictions (mine and other people’s), heartbreaks.
I don’t really know why, but Orwell’s novel made me feel strangely optimistic about the world - or maybe just aware that I had to keep going, no matter what.
I had left for Australia with two of my best friends, and even though I spent time working, travelling, having fun, I absolutely hated that country full of drunk people at parties and surfers everywhere. That was my own personal dystopia - and in a way, I knew it was fuel. I knew I needed to fall into that mess to find myself again.
During those months between 2007 and 2008, I carried a tiny MP3 player that could only hold one or two albums at a time. I mostly remember:
Autechre – Tri Repetae
Saul Williams – The Rise and Fall of Niggy Stardust
Nine Inch Nails – Year Zero
Radiohead – In Rainbows
During long bus rides on the Australian Gold Coast I’d load whatever MP3s I found on the public computers at internet cafés - where I’d go at night to talk to my family on MSN. That’s how I first heard or met again with Björk, Daft Punk, Junior Boys, LCD Soundsystem, Hercules & Love Affair, Burial, Flying Lotus.
Back then I was mainly into NIN, Warp Records and industrial stuff like Throbbing Gristle, Cabaret Voltaire, Coil. Those MP3 tracks widened my world and surely informed what the inception of Mixed Up was all about - worlds colliding.
I travelled OZ with nothing but a backpack. And even if it sounds cliché: I was fine with almost nothing. I even stopped thinking about weed. I felt something I’d never felt before. Like an explorer. A witness of a world that wasn’t home - and yet I didn’t feel lost.
I thought differently about lost love. I regained confidence.
I knew I would go back home, and I knew I would leave all of that behind without regret. And I had to help my younger brother, who was going through an even worse time than me.
At some point I said goodbye to my friends and travelled alone. It wasn’t always great.
One night I got off at the wrong bus stop, ended up in the middle of nowhere, and luckily found a room.
I smoked too much cigarettes, ate terribly, lost weight. And then I found a sort of center of gravity in Bundaberg, picking fruit and meeting people I’m still in touch with today. I celebrated my birthday there. We were kicked out of the hostel and as a “punishment” they gave us a whole house. Australians are unbelievable.
During one of my solo trips between Brisbane and Cairns, I found myself on long roads cutting through forests - the trees glowing in orange shades unlike anything in Italy. The aforementioned music in my player.
Nine Inch Nails’s Ghosts was my main soundtrack for the bad times. That collection of tracks reinforced my idea to try making instrumental, electronic music.
Months later, back home, I discovered Grouper’s music for the first time by chance, thanks to a review in an Italian magazine, and something strange happened: I started remembering those hours on the bus as if they had been soundtracked by “Heavy Water / I’d Rather be Sleeping.”
At first it didn’t feel odd. I thought I was just searching for memories into my mind. But then the memory and the music began to merge, and I started doubting my own recollections. It was the first time I realised I could literally bend space and time into something fictional. In my mind, it felt true: I had listened to that song on that bus.
That trigger informed the concept behind April Clocks.
That’s also when I started reading more fantasy: Haruki Murakami, then J.G. Ballard and his early sci-fi. Two opposite cultures - Japanese and British - two completely different forms of surrealism. And yet that cold, hallucinatory mix carved a world inside me made of unease, romance, sex, sinister sliding doors and relentless destinies.
Now I’m not even sure if I adapted to that world, or if I was already aligned with it.
The other long-form piece that broke my heart was reading the memories of Mika Vainio’s family and friends after his death. I knew about his alcoholism and depression - the guy at the record shop told me about it twenty years ago when I bought Pan Sonic’s Kulma. (A special mention to Andrea, who introduced me to so much music over the years.)
And yet, nothing in Vainio’s story overlaps with mine. Not even the way he approached the studio, if we want to call it that way. I didn’t need those testimonies to know Mika was a craftsman - someone who spent entire days trying to build new sounds from ordinary tools. You could hear it in the music, the most uncomfortable and fascinating sound I’ve ever experienced.
His childhood story hit me. The transformation that happened in him after the bullying.
I read those parts with attention and with a sort of fear - the fear you feel as a parent.
It’s absurd that we can celebrate art while behind it sit silent tragedies. And that without those tragedies, we might not have this beauty at all.
A dear friend of mine has been telling me this for years: you can’t make art unless something overflowing is pushing you from the inside. There’s no formula. Sometimes the only peace we find is through tools that aren’t even our voice, or our words.
I thought for a long time about including lyrics in the new April Clocks tracks I’m working on. Lyrics I would have had to sing. I even wrote and recorded some - amateurish, incomplete, but meaningful - even solid, in some cases. Then I stopped. Almost as if saying the words out loud stripped them of their weight, like a secret that loses its aura once revealed. Like a magician explaining the trick.
I still believe that showing more isn’t always necessary.
I still believe in the attention of whoever is on the other side.
In the power of creating worlds precisely when things aren’t explained.
That there’s still space for imagination, even in a world where we know everything, where information is everywhere. Where we can replicate the exact sound of our favorite artists - but they got there through trial and error, without anyone before them showing the way.
I haven’t still heard ‘Sysivalo’, the posthumous and final record by Mika Vainio as Ø in full, and while i know it does certainly sounds miles away from the stuff made by Grouper, i still feel like they’re connected in spirit, and that attitude being something unique I’m trying to explore in my own way, merging light and darkness.
Sweet dreams and harsh reality.
This is Sleepstream#1, folks. See you soon.