Rewilding through Music: a Return to the Ocean with Coco Francavilla

My sonic journey actually started very young. I began playing classical guitar at the Conservatory of Music and slowly moved into punk rock and electronic music when I was a teenager.

The shift in my music journey was when I met Tricky from Massive Attack and started going on tour with him. It was a really formative experience, not only because I was working with one of my favorites. I played at big festivals like Glastonbury, in big studios and I realized very quickly what it means to be an established artist and that it wasn’t for me. I really wanted to make a different turn in my music career, to explore frequencies and sounds in another way that wouldn’t necessarily be discographical or traditional, but rather be behind the scenes in the studio and see it from a different angle.

I really started this personal journey with the vision to make something meaningful, where I wanted to be in service of music and how it can be a thread for storytelling. I moved to New York and started working on film scores that many times had social justice or environment-related causes.

After relocating again for personal reasons, this time to Zurich, I realized that I didn’t want my child to grow up in a city. I wanted to be closer to nature and explore a different way of living – more simple, more in contact with outdoor life.

That’s when I moved to Ibiza. It was a very strange coincidence, because I arrived in Ibiza for music, Skin from Skunk Anansie invited me to produce her album and she was in Ibiza at the time. When I arrived for the first time, I discovered another side of the island. I wasn’t close to the clubbing scene; my sound has always been closer to ambient and experimental music. I got in touch with the beautiful nature and marine ecosystem. I was really impressed by this sacred atmosphere on the island. I was looking for a place like this.

I arrived in Ibiza with this huge baggage and experience after being in the music industry for 20 years. And I was like, okay, wow, here I found my place. So this is where my rewilding process started. Ibiza is still a very gentrified place, but I started living a different lifestyle, staying in the countryside. I began to shift my priorities and behavior, giving attention to little things that are beyond success and making a big career.

At this point I started my Re-Oceaning project, which is leading me to reconnect with the sea. I grew up by the sea because I spent my summers in Sardinia, but in Ibiza I discovered one of the most unique marine ecosystems in the world, called Posidonia Oceanica, which is an underwater plant that has been living for millions of years. Between Ibiza and Formentera lies one of the oldest Posidonia meadows in the world, considered the oldest living organism on the planet – it’s been growing for over 100,000 years. It’s a wonderful underwater forest, with long leaves that seem to dance with you as you swim close.

The music industry in general creates a lot of carbon footprint. It’s not a sustainable industry, like almost every other. Think about all the people that come to the island for the club scene. Now we have the opening of the largest club in Europe, hosting thousands of people every day from April to October. It’s not only about the visitors, but also musicians and DJs flying in on private jets. There’s no clean transportation from club to club, plenty of plastic use. Then there’s the accommodation side, the waste from hotels going directly into the sea.

On such a small island this is so unbalanced. It creates pressure on the whole ecosystem, and unfortunately it comes mainly from the music industry.

I think it’s time for the industry itself to take care of it. There are regenerative farming projects happening, but it needs to be a collective effort among big clubs, stakeholders and institutions. Most of the people coming to the island have no idea about the marine environment – all they see are posters of DJs playing. But we breathe because of the ocean, we breathe because of Posidonia. With the climate crisis, we don’t have much time. We need to act quickly.

It began as a personal journey. I started inviting other artists to the island. I wanted to share this with my ambient friends – ambient music is more receptive to this kind of topic because our inspiration comes from nature and field recordings.

There was a collective idea to honor the marine ecosystem on the island as a symbol of ocean resilience. But then I realized it wasn’t enough, because on the other side there was part of the music scene systematically creating a lot of impact.

Right now there’s a big discussion in the industry, with people becoming aware of these issues. It’s now that we get back to the rewilding concept. I like using the phrase “reocean yourself“, because it’s the ocean where we come from. Voices multiplied by millions can really make a change. I have this dream that the music industry can really unite against the climate crisis and make a change. That’s where my NGO Music For The Sea started.

I invited Rafael Anton Irisarri, Grand River, Sophie Birch, Patricia Wolf, Kazuya Nagaya, and recently Suzanne Ciani, the pioneer of electronic music. Other artists are coming, like KMRU, Abul Mogard and Lyra Pramuk… many artists from the ambient scene are getting involved. They usually come to the island and we go on expeditions to discover Posidonia and do field recordings for Posidonia Soundscapes. The project became part of the UNESCO United Nations Ocean Decade, the initiative to promote several projects and challenges to make 30% of the ocean a protected area by 2030. With Posidonia Soundscapes we’re merging marine conservation and underwater acoustics.

We deployed hydrophones in partnership with the University of Cadiz, and the data collected serves as a scientific tool to study the marine environment and anthropogenic impact on one side and for artists to create music on the other. We’re developing tools for music lovers to use the sample pack inspired by nature and the ocean to create music – we just did a feature on Ableton – but we also use this data and these field recordings to create music ourselves. In this way, artists and scientists have the same role: bringing knowledge about the ocean and engaging people emotionally.

We collaborate not only with institutions but with many local players, for example zero-emission boating operators, local marine biologists and marine conservation efforts. We organize gatherings and open discussions about sonic ecology. With the UNESCO endorsement, more artists are starting to write to us, saying they’re making songs inspired by the ocean using our sounds. The hope is that Music For The Sea becomes a hub for artists to start a dialogue about sonic ecology around marine conservation and climate action.

With the performance, I’m going through the re-oceaning journey, how ocean sounds can bring us back to our primordial memory of when we were in water in the womb. We come from water, we come from the ocean. The performance includes some soundscapes that I’ve been recording over the last few years on the island. I’m also going to explore brainwave entrainment through binaural beat technique, which is a way to stimulate the brain to perceive a new frequency. In this case a theta wave, which is thought to be one of the brainwaves that helps with creativity and relaxation.

About the conversation with Damir, I’m going to share this whole journey, but I want to keep it open with the audience too, because my story is just a small example of how people get together with a vision to change something.

I don’t think my life would have gone this way if I wasn’t a big fan of Ian MacKaye, if I didn’t realize that you have to do it yourself, believe in your dreams and integrity. It makes me so emotional, because to me it means so much not to compromise your integrity for fame or money. And it’s not easy to sacrifice job proposals or a career sometimes. But I never wanted to give my publishing away or sign to a label, and I’m happy that I pursued this path.

This ethic is where everything starts. If you don’t have strong beliefs, you get trapped in the system. Only if you’re really committed to sticking with your values can you make a little change.