Laura Agnusdei’s latest record, Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica, is a revelation. The title alone evokes striking images of ecological urgency and stark contrasts. The Italian saxophonist and composer embraces a spirit of sonic exploration, seamlessly weaving together acoustic instrumentation, electronic textures, and deep thematic resonance. Through radical optimism, Agnusdei navigates the tensions between collapse and renewal, drawing inspiration from literature, activism, and the non-human world. Spellbinding and immersive, this is an album that unfolds its depths through repeated listens and close attention.
Flowers Blooming In Antarctica is out out now on Maple Death.
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I always like starting at the very beginning. I’d love to hear about some of your earliest memories of music and sound – are there certain things that stand out to you as memorable or formative from when you were younger? What are some of your first memories related to music?
I remember listening to music with my dad in his car, he was very fond of black music, soul, funk, blues… I remember all those tapes with B.B. King, Aretha Franklin, and James Brown, I think that was very influential on my taste. I also remember very well my first guitar lesson… but in the end, I chose the sax.
When did you start playing music and creating your own works? Was the saxophone the first instrument you started with?
My first instrument was the guitar, my mom chose it for me, and it makes me laugh how in my music now, the guitar is absent…I had my first band at 16, I played guitar and then bass, and I started playing sax at 18. It was when I was 24 and all my bands broke up that I started composing alone, experimenting with Ableton Live, It was a very dark moment of my 20s when I started but it turned out to be also the beginning of a new path, the right one I’d say now.
Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica is described as a career-defining record. What felt different about creating this album compared to your previous work?
For this album, I invited more people to take part in my music. I wanted this album to be more “live”, with more interplay, My sax it’s never alone! There are still plenty of electronic sounds but it features also a lot of acoustic instruments. It’s also more groovy and somehow structured, I challenged myself to compose tracks that were less “liquid” but with a more solid form, I’d say.
The album explores themes of ecology, non-human life, and environmental conflict. What drew you to these subjects, and how did you approach translating them into sound?
On the one hand, I just follow the news, so I am just a citizen aware of the systemic collapse we live currently in, and, even if for very little, I took part in some protests with the Extinction Rebellion group of Bologna and it was an incredibly positive experience, I admire these young activists very much. On the other hand, in the past years, I read a lot about how animals and plants listen and communicate with sounds, I find it a very fascinating subject and led me also to some philosophical readings about the limit of anthropocentrism. All this translates into sounds more on an imaginary level, searching for electronic sounds that feel organic, weird, and hybrid, trying to give a sense of “sensory exotica”.
Your inspirations span literature, science fiction, and surreal art—James Bridle’s Ways of Being, Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, and J.G. Ballard’s climate fiction. How did these works influence your composition and sound design?
When I make music I often think about sounds as composing an imaginary scenario. It’s not something planned consciously, and the clear definition of this scenario often comes when the track is done. So I was reading Ballard and Bridle while I was composing the album, and everything came out very naturally, while Serafini is more a visual reference for the artwork, I chose Daniele Castellano, an amazing illustrator whose style reminds me a lot of Serafini’s work. Daniele did also a full book (which is also a calendar for 2087) inspired by my album, and this is the first release of an editorial series of books and records curated by Maple Death Records and Canicola Edizioni.
The album’s title evokes both beauty and contradiction. Why Flowers Are Blooming In Antarctica?
I read this phrase for the first time on an Instagram post on the British page of Extinction Rebellion. It struck me as very powerful, in fact, it’s just a title of a scientific article if you dig deeper, cause it’s a fact not just a poetic image! But I chose it because I think it condenses a sense of end and beginning at the same time, and what’s powerful about the time we live in is that the whole system is collapsing and we have the chance to imagine and build new worlds, new way of thinking and connecting.
Your tenor saxophone plays a central role throughout the album. Did you approach the instrument differently on this project?
Not that much, but in two tracks (“P.P.R.N” and “Emperor Penguin Lullaby”) I experimented for the first time with modular synthesizers and saxophone and I really like the results cause it’s rhythmic but also textural.
“Are We Dinos?” (such a great song title!) features an interview with two preschoolers. How did this idea come about, and what role do their voices play in the album’s message?
That playful interview with two kids was recorded in the summer of 2020 when I wasn’t thinking at all about making a new record, It’s just a memory of a fun moment while I was working as a kind of babysitter in a surf school on the beach. It was just 3 years later working on that track I had the idea of using it, cause it fits perfectly with the “theme” of the album I was then composing. They just answer spontaneously to my question “Are we Dinos? Are we going to extinction?” … ”No”. It’s their answer not mine, but retrospectively I think it can symbolise an approach that affirms life, the power of imagination against nihilism. Maybe we need this childlike approach much more than a more adult apocalyptic resignation.
The album is described as oscillating between radical optimism and sonic liberation. How do you personally interpret this duality in your music? And specifically with radical optimism, how do you try and approach that in your life?
Well, I like to do things, I am addicted to being busy with projects and ideas… So I believe we must stay active and take responsibility to be the change we want to see in the world. I do my part more on the cultural level, trying to keep the underground scene and make space for unconventional music, but my true admiration goes to those who do the real political grassroots work.
What were some of the challenges you had to overcome in making this record? What surprised you?
At the beginning, my idea was to make the full record with a quartet featuring me on sax and electronics, Edoardo Grisogani on percussion and drum pad, Giacomo Bertocchi on clarinet, flute, alto sax, and Giulio Stermieri on Farfisa organ and synthesizers. We recorded together 4 tracks in the summer of 2022 and then I took the recordings home to do post-production and mixing myself. I had never done this before, I was used to a solo approach more focused on electronic sounds and it was challenging to work with material that was partly composed, partly improvised, and not mixed… In the beginning, I thought I had the wrong idea, cause I couldn’t immediately find a way to shape the overall sound of these pieces. For many reasons I stopped working on these songs for months and when I started again to dedicate myself almost full-time to the album I slowly found my way to make everything sound interesting to me! It was a slow process also for other songs that were initially recorded at Worm Studios in Rotterdam in 2022 and then finished with overdubs more than a year later. It’s a record in which I experimented with a lot of processes I had never done before, another example is “The Drowned World” where for the first time I wrote a beat for an acoustic drum.
And to close, as always, what are some of your favorite sounds in the world?
I like to listen to the sounds of the wind gently shaking little leaves on trees or the soft sound of crickets in the field during summer time and I love how the cuckoo sings! But also Stan Getz’s tone on tenor saxophone is so airy, so sexy, it gives me the chill every time!
Foxy Digitalis depends on our awesome readers to keep things rolling. Pledge your support today via our Patreon or subscribe to The Jewel Garden. You can also make a one-time donation via Ko-fi.
