He liked the harmonious quality of our music. I think it moved him. In his mind's eye, he was looking for a minimalistic accompaniment, something light, adapted to a text read in Italian. Based on my experience, it's best not to be too rhythmic or percussive for this style of piece. I believe that's what drew him to us.

For "Bird", we let our inspiration run wild. He had fairly specific ideas for the next two pieces. We suggested a few themes, but apart from that, he knew exactly what he was looking for. As for the feeling he wanted us to impart into each song, he indicated which passages required a starker mood, and those that were more upbeat. In some cases, he opted for a solo guitar. His ideas were very clear, so he was able to give us reference points and indications to help us create the pieces. Using the themes we had suggested, he in turn gave us a framework. He was like an orchestra conductor; the words were his sheet music. Guided by those words, we sped up, slowed down, expressed this feeling or that.

We noticed that since Alessandro Baricco whispered at times, we had to turn the sound up very high. We were plugged in on the side. In this situation, when someone speaks, you can hear every little sound their mouth makes. We really got into that aspect, so we recorded with the sound up extremely high. That's when we heard a strong whistling sound in the background. This particular sound was a bit of an issue. But I think the most challenging part was finding the right tone to match Alessandro's rendition.

When it came to mixing the album, we decided to work with Nigel Godrich, a "mix master" of sorts. We had known him for quite some time, since we first met him during Beck's Mutations sessions. As you can tell from his name, Nigel doesn't understand a word of Italian. Mixing the album was difficult, since we didn't know how much to emphasize the voice, how loud or soft to make it. We hesitated a lot, because we don't understand Italian, so we feared drowning out the voice in the music and losing the meaning of the text. We had no way of checking this.

If we processed the voice, this had an impact on the music, since both were on the same piece. Consequently, we had to bring the voice and the music out onto two different tracks, in order to compress the voice without altering the music, and vice versa. It was a bit of a mind-twister. We had to work as much as possible from the source.

It was like making music for a film, except that instead of film images, we had literary images, and a voice. I think the atmosphere created was escapist, it helps you get away.

This is an entrancing album. At times, during certain passages, Alessandro's voice is spellbinding. That was, in the end, the result we sought.