Before the Music Diary, Solaria told its own story through three long videos, one for each of the first three tracks, released between August 2024 and February 2026. They were almost like small documentaries, conceived as finished works: heavily scripted, constructed, edited and polished, with the ambition of properly explaining the project and giving each episode its own autonomous, complete form.
The three documentary episodes
Episode 1 · Winning or playing?
August 2024 · track: 01 - Sky, Earth and Life
Episode 2 · Ku
June 2025 · track: 02 - Ku
Episode 3 · Wind and Rain
February 2026 · track: 03 - Wind and Rain
The Wind and Rain lab videos
For Wind and Rain the process was already being told through a series of lab videos as well, which are the seed of the diary format:
- Turning Conway’s Game of Life into Music (August 2025) — an experiment turning Conway’s Game of Life into music: cells that become notes, alive or silent. It works, but leaves a gap where destiny and freedom should be.
- Eolica and Piano Pioggia (October 2025) — the two acoustic fragments, wind on the tailpiece and rain on the prepared piano.
- The Rain Composer (October 2025) — the generative web instrument where every drop becomes a note: the digital rain of the track.
- Creating a Digital Wind of Music in Ableton Live (November 2025) — fast arpeggios on the Gb pentatonic scale that become the digital wind.
- Wind and Rain (music) (January 2026) — the finished track, without commentary → 03 - Wind and Rain.
What they left behind
Each episode required months and months of preparation: scripting, location scouting, filming, editing. They were essential in laying the “philosophical” foundations of the project and in learning how to shoot and edit a video. In hindsight, they were also fundamental in understanding one’s own potential in terms of communication and artistic direction.
Why the format changed
The shift from the documentary episodes to the Diario musicale arose mainly from a sustainability problem. The result could be more elegant, but the video ended up becoming almost a second artistic project, parallel to the music: it took too much time and, above all, risked slowing down the very thing it was meant to tell. The creative flow strictly tied to music and worldbuilding was being lost.
With the Diario musicale the logic is reversed: the video no longer needs to be the work, but a window onto the work as it comes into being. Once a week, one simply tells where things have gotten to, what has been done, what didn’t work and what the next step will be. The result is less preparation, no need for a perfect script, more spontaneity, a weekly continuity, and a very useful internal function: telling what has been done forces one to put order into the process and understand where to go next (see [[Music Diary#Funzione nel progetto|Music Diary#Role within the project]]).
In this, the switch to Italian was also crucial, starting from episode 21: the first twenty episodes were in deliberately imperfect English, but telling the story in one’s own language removes an additional filter and makes the diary more direct and spontaneous.
In essence:
- documentary episodes: turning the creative process into a finished audiovisual product;
- Music Diary: letting the creative process remain at the center and using the video simply to document it.
Over time, an even more precise formulation emerged: the project isn’t made for the audience — a door is built through which the audience can enter the project.
Three levels, separated
In the three documentary episodes, three different levels coexisted within the same audiovisual object:
- the music, meaning the track and the compositional process;
- the worldbuilding: cities, characters, cultures, systems, objects;
- the allegorical interpretation, with philosophical, literary, artistic and symbolic references explaining what everything “meant.”
So each video had to do too many things at once: be music, documentary, essay and world narrative all together. It was rich, but very heavy to build, and risked explaining too much.
The current system separates the levels:
- the music lives in the Diario musicale;
- the worldbuilding lives in this wiki;
- the allegory is no longer explained systematically, but remains embedded in the project and is left to emerge indirectly.
This last shift is the most important one: before, the allegory was “translated” for the viewer; now it is staged. One no longer says “this thing represents that”: instead, Theknus, Yantra, the newspaper Rasha, the language, the clock, the characters are built, and meaning forms on its own in whoever enters the world. The shift, then, was not only from a complex video to a simpler one, but from a single container that explained everything to an ecosystem of different forms, each with a precise function.
Before, I told music, world and meaning in the same video.
Now I document the music, build the world elsewhere, and leave the meaning implicit.
More entry points
The shift to the Diario musicale also served to increase the surface of contact with the project. Before, the door was too narrow: to truly enter Solaria one had to watch a long, dense video that held together music, worldbuilding and allegory. It was a rich point of access, but it asked a lot of the viewer.
By separating the dimensions, the entry points multiplied:
- the Diario musicale for those entering through the creative process;
- the wiki for those drawn to the world, the cities, the languages, the objects and the cultures;
- the tracks for those who simply want to listen to music;
- the story for those who prefer to enter through narrative;
- the allegory remains in the background and can be discovered gradually, without being explained right away.
The change of format was not just a production simplification, but an architectural choice for the project: instead of a single, very narrow main door, many different accesses to the same artistic core.
Before, I tried to fit the whole project inside a video.
Then I understood it was better to let people enter the project from many different points.
The documentary explained the project; the Diario musicale increases the surface of contact with the project.