In Conversation #3

Riccardo La Foresta: review, mix, and interview

Sep 07, 2025

∙ Paid

Earlier this year I launched an ACL internet radio show for CAMP, airing every other Sunday at 6pm CET and available on their Mixcloud soon after. My mix for 13 April 2025 was dedicated to experimental drumming and percussion, in honor of ZERO, 999… the new record from Riccardo La Foresta. My review of that record has just been published at the ACL blog, and so this post collects this mix and review, with an additional preamble serving as a primer to La Foresta’s work. Additionally, the full transcript of our conversation is available for paid subscribers below.

Does the world need another drum solo?, Primary, 1 of 2

The title of La Foresta’s 2019 debut asks Does the world need another drum solo? The answer: well, that depends. Consider the Drummophone:

La Foresta began developing his drummophone in 2015, after realizing that he could radically alter the timbre of the drum by vibrating it with air rather than striking it—turning the drum into a wind instrument. This goes beyond developing extended techniques for the instrument, because this simple shift fundamentally altered the classification of the drum, transforming it into something new.

In the Drummophone’s Manifesto (2021), La Foresta writes:

Through the creative path of improvisation, I developed the Drummophone, a system that allows me to treat the drum as an aerophone, both with breath (like a wind instrument) and electric blowers (like an organ).
With my research I aim to define a new language and vocabulary for percussion, performers, composer and question the role of the player as a listener, while continuing to develop technically the Drummophone.

Following the Hornbostel-Sachs classification, the most widely used system for classifying sound-instruments, we encounter today five major categories: idiophones, chordophones, aerophones, membranophones and electrophones.
This classification satisfies day-to-day requirements but, as the Drummophone proved, it can’t be considered as absolute.

Drummophone (2020), one of many excellent releases on Kohlhass, documents the timbral range of the drummophone, integrated with flourishes of more traditional drumming as well.

La Foresta’s voice as a composer continued to develop with Fenomenologia Delle Percussioni [phenomenology of percussion] for Superpang (2021), a short suite of music commissioned by the director of the experimental music festival Skaņu mežs for the radio program Tada müzika on Latvijas Radio. Again, La Foresta utilizes his drummophone and electronics to produce shifting textures and drones against which his more traditional percussion playing can shine. This radiophonic work encouraged La Foresta to think more compositionally, after so much time improvising in space in real time.

In the year’s leading up to ZERO, 999…, La Foresta often found himself booked as the acoustic set at electronic music festivals. He developed his live electro-acoustic performance practice, but always in dialogue with the spaces he was in, attending to the architectural acoustics that alter his playing. Indeed, spatial sound has always been an important component of La Foresta’s work. Does the world need another drum solo? was record by Rentato Grieco (kNN) inside the atrium of the former Sant'Agostino Hospital in Modena, and that almost sculptural element of his playing is also evident on Drummophone.

In 2021, La Foresta joined Anthony Pateras and Stefano Pilia for the noise rock group Sulla Lingua. Trained as a jazz drummer in his youth, La Foresta tells me that part of the appeal of playing in this trio is the simplicity of three musicians playing in real time together, something he’s missed playing solo and working on studio compositions. Both Pateras and Pilia contribute to Zero, 999… as well, and their approach to composition, as individuals and as a group, has also been an important influence on La Foresta’s development as a composer.

So in a way, all these previous recordings feel like preparatory research—developing his instrument, working with it as an improvisor, and playing with sound in space. Now a mature composer, ZERO, 999… can rightly be said to be La Foresta’s proper full-length debut.

Riccardo La Foresta ~ ZERO, 999...

The cover of Riccardo La Foresta’s ZERO, 999… depicts an impossibly tall spiral tower vanishing into the sky, an aptly disorienting visual metaphor for an album that dismantles traditional notions of drumming. Here, drums are not rhythmic anchors but vessels for breath, sustain, and drone—gestural yet devoid of traditional pulse, animated by instability and flux. La Foresta’s practice centers around the drummophone, an instrument of his own invention he began developing in 2015, when he first experimented with blowing air through a cymbal attached to a drum. Forged from a decade of research expanding his process—through live performance, improvisation, and installation—ZERO, 999… is a conceptually focused and compositionally sophisticated album worthy of the status as La Foresta’s official debut.

In Drummophone’s Manifesto, La Foresta asks a simple question: “What is a drum?” Traditionally, drums are membranophones, in which a stretched membrane is struck to produce a sound. The introduction of a new technique—vibrating the membrane with air—transforms the drum into an aerophone, making the drummophone closer to a kazoo or harmonium than a snare. As he notes in his manifesto, “while using it, it’s possible to obtain acoustic drones, melodies, and complex beats that drastically distance the instrument from traditional drumming and gestures.” The six tracks on Drummophone (2020) demonstrate the breadth of sounds that La Foresta can coax out of his instrument, ranging from low rumbling drones to teeth-tingling feedback, gentle coos to whimsical pitch oscillations and metallic skittering. As a proof of concept, those recordings led to opportunities to mount installations, with La Foresta often finding himself as the “acoustic set” at electronic festivals.

Not content to flatten his live performances and in-situ installation work into stereo audio recordings, on ZERO, 999…, La Foresta enters a new phase of his career, using the drummophone as a sound library from which to develop a new compositional language. The timbral expression of the drummophone shifts across the record; as La Foresta describes it, “at times it resembles a clarinet arpeggio, at others a deep, percussive rumble or even a square-wave-style synth.” Many of the sounds heard on ZERO, 999… have been further transformed in the studio, looped and resampled and layered to produce something yet again new. And while the drummophone is present on every track, La Foresta also plays more traditional percussion, beating his drums and sometimes bowing cymbals, presenting further possibilities for experimentation.

The album opens with “Drawdown,” a dynamic interplay of electronic textures and traditional drum sounds integrated with the drummophone, generating oscillating high-pitched screeches and subterranean resonance. The opening 30 seconds form a kind of unit, which structures the duration of the piece, but absent time-keeping percussion, the music takes on a drifting character that sets it apart from the kind of music we might expect from a drummer-composer. This is percussion as texture, as atmosphere, resulting in some of the most affecting electroacoustic music you'll hear this year. And while far from pop, at just over 3 minutes in length, it is digestible antipasto before getting into the album proper. In fact–with “Xhakers” the longest composition at 4:43, and “angelica chiurgia” the shortest at 1:26, and clocking in at a total runtime of 35 minutes–the record demonstrates an economy of craft rare in experimental music.

While solo percussion albums do exist–particularly in experimental music–it should be unsurprising that collaboration plays a key role across ZERO, 999…, with La Foresta calling in some help to augment his compositions. “Drums, percussion, and strange textures were already there,” he tells me, so he focused on what was missing, soliciting wordless vocals, electric guitars, and various electronic contributions. “HOLD” is the first of six songs to feature Ale Hop on electric guitar, an intense counterpoint to La Foresta’s furious drum hits. Sara Persico also contributes vocal ASMR to the track, though the effect is perhaps more disconcerting than euphoric. Hop is joined by Valerio Tricoli and Anthony Pateras on the next track, “20230704_102400.jpg,” the two granting a profound acousmatic depth to the proceedings, an airy affair that builds in waves of static. La Foresta cites Pateras’ compositional approach as particularly influential in structuring the record, having worked closely with the Australian artist alongside Stefano Pilia in the noise rock trio Sulla Lingua.

The entire b-side is even more engrossing, beginning with “The Lower Primate In Us 2,” featuring tape processing by Renato Grieco (kNN). Full of charged silences, the buzz of stabbing tones, and reverberant virtual voices, “Prima” further develops those same elements–the two tracks might as well be one composition in two parts–but with more insistent drums driving the momentum. “Xhakers” is the longest track on the album, and with powerful fuzz courtesy of Aleksandra Słyż (synth), Adam Jełowicki (tenor sax), and Gerard Lebik (soprano sax), may be the most climactic. Antonina Nowacka, who grants an angelic chorus to “Calco,” returns to get cut up on “angelica chiurgia” [angelic surgery]. Pilia’s modular treated guitar on the stunning closing track “Eye Contact (Nereo's)” is a reminder of his utter singularity as an artist and one of the most vital guitar players working today. Ending on a decisive downbeat, quickly fading out the silence, the record begs to be flipped over and played again.

Yet despite these layers of process and collaboration which make the record so rich of a listen, the core of ZERO, 999… remains La Foresta’s playing, always rooted in physicality. “I call myself a percussionist, but in reality, I’m a drummer,” he admits. As I’ve argued elsewhere, percussionists make for particularly interesting composers, something I asked La Foresta to reflect upon. “Composition is just a natural extension of playing drums… the body becomes a compositional tool.” Movement and its absence, like sound and silence, both carry meaning, and La Foresta has had to create new gestures to adapt to the novelty of the drummophone, resulting in a compositional language that is “a choreography of sound, motion, and space.” The often cryptic titles, combined with the album artwork, also hints at a deeper conceptual guide.

The album’s title reflects its philosophical underpinnings. As with the cover art, La Foresta was drawn to the “idea of something that appears infinite, but isn’t.” The ellipses at the end of the title are the mathematical symbol for a repeating decimal, representing infinite approximation, a process that is always heading towards a resolution it never quite reaches. As he elaborates, “0.999… seems to be in constant motion, while 1 is completely still, like feedback, also. For me, the analogy is that the process is the result.” This tension between motion and stasis mirrors La Foresta’s own artistic evolution: from jazz-trained drummer to installation artist, from durational performances to studio composition. “By limiting physical presence and gesture, I’ve moved away from technical virtuosity… The live experience, once centered on movement, has become an opportunity for collective investigation.”

While working on composing and recomposing this album, La Foresta found inspiration in Italo Calvino’s 1973 novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which the protagonists are stuck in a castle unable to speak, conveying their stories with tarot cards instead. “One by one, their narratives begin to intertwine on the table, forming a complex, entangled plot. It felt like the perfect metaphor for what was happening with this record—organically taking shape out of pure chaos.” Interestingly, the Tower card is missing from their deck, a card which anticipates a fall, an unraveling that makes way for reinvention. Likewise, ZERO, 999…., which returns the tower on its cover, feels like both a culmination and a dissolution. It is percussion stripped of certainty, where every strike is a question, every breath a recomposition. (Joseph Sannicandro)