I’d downloaded the FLAC file from what.cd, the only music torrent tracker that made you pass an exam first. You had to pass a test about file formats and bitrates to gain access. The album cover showed layers of what feels like consciousness ascending toward some nameless heaven. The track names mapped a journey: “Before the Beginning” opens the album, “Central” sits roughly in the middle, “After the Ending” closes it. I could hear them, and their position in the character’s journey.

I listened to the album alone. Dimmed the lights. Evenings after school. The way Frusciante said to. I was ugly and lost. Not dramatically, just the ordinary ugliness and lostness of adolescence. So I read. I listened. I accumulated beautiful things. I passed tests to prove I deserved quality.

Around the same time, I discovered Léo’s Les Mondes d’Aldébaran, a bande dessinée series about human colonies on alien planets. Blues from wine-dark to electric, greens from jungle to verdigris. Interesting worldbuilding. But most importantly: names. Places and animals with names that sounded like somewhere else. Robledo. Betelgeuse. Alvin Benevides. The first page of the series describes the “Benevides transfert”. No matter the scientific accuracy, the name itself was beautiful. Looking at Aldébaran-4’s paysages brought peace.

The characters were simple, almost binary. Good people and bad people, drawn in stark ligne claire: women with exaggerated curves, nobody with lips, “good” men muscular and “bad” ones fat and balding. Not nuanced. But I needed that simplicity. It helped me get out of my head. Léo is Brazilian, saw a dictatorship. His politics bleed into the work in ways I don’t always agree with. But the worldbuilding is larger than his politics. That’s where the nuance lives.

These two works gave me the same feeling. Not because they’re similar. One is instrumental guitar music about death and transcendence. The other is a bande dessinée about alien ecology and colonial ambition. But when I listen to “Heaven” while reading La Créature, I get goosebumps. Not from either alone. From both.

This essay is about why.

The Test

Getting into what.cd required proving you understood digital sound. Bitrates. File formats. Audiograms. Waveforms. The audible spectrum. Lossy versus lossless compression. I took the test on a hackintosh built from dump parts. salvaged motherboard, scavenged RAM, macOS installed on hardware Apple never blessed. It worked. Finally: a machine that could run the software I needed.

I passed. The test was technical, and I’d been technical since ten. Dump motherboards, hackintosh installs, the kind of knowledge you get from having no pocket money and too much time.

Suddenly I had access to everything in FLAC. Not mp3s ripped from YouTube. Not the compressed files everyone else streamed. Quality. I spent time on /mu/, the 4chan music board, where I learned to listen to whole albums instead of singles. I learned about concept albums. I learned about Frusciante’s life: his heroin years, his departure from the Red Hot Chili Peppers, the hermit period where he made music alone. I found Invisible Movement, the fan site named after one of his earlier songs. That site became my encyclopedia for understanding his work.

I was sixteen, seventeen. People outside my closest circle were starting to notice me. I was becoming myself, or a version that worked. I wanted to stop being the weird kid. I learned that being different meant being myself, not playing myself.

But I needed the cultural accumulation anyway. I needed to be interesting, even if that wasn’t why people liked me. The fear underneath: that if I stopped accumulating, I’d disappear. I was only worth noticing if I had something to show.

I found “The Past Recedes” on YouTube. Then downloaded The Empyrean in FLAC and listened properly.

Heaven, Part Two

The song “Heaven” is okay in the beginning. Pleasant. Atmospheric. But then, around the second part, there’s a buildup. Slowly, things start shifting. And then Frusciante sings:

“When I speak to you again through the stages of pleasure.”

Not the words, but the way he sings them. The strings opening up after a bass-heavy segue, the way the layers reveal themselves. Goosebumps. Intense feelings. Sadness. Longing. Something sublime happening against a backdrop of loss.

My favorite track was “Central”, my most-played song on last.fm for nine consecutive years. It’s the most stratified song on the album, sitting exactly in the middle of the character’s story. Track five, “Dark/Light”, splits the album tonally. “Central” is the axis. There’s always something new to discover depending on which part you focus on. I remember listening once and focusing entirely on the bass line. I rediscovered the song. That’s what FLAC quality gave you: the ability to choose which layer to hear. The album cover made this explicit. The ascent to the empyrean, blue sky and gold sediment, geological time compressed into pattern. Dante’s heavens rendered as atmosphere.

The album ends with “After the Ending”, voices processed with effects until they sound otherwordly. The perfect sonic companion to a planet opera about discovery.

I discovered the Dante connection reading about the album online. Frusciante mentioned Dante’s Divine Comedy in interviews. I felt obligated to read it. Years later, I did. It was fine. Admirable, canonical, dead. Too many self-inserts. Dante’s bitterness in written form. Dante hates someone, so that person goes to hell. Boring. Unimaginative. Maybe a lot was lost in translation. But the truth is: I had way more feelings listening to Frusciante than reading Dante.

Whatever I was looking for, I’d already found it in the guitar layers and the stratified heavens of the album cover. Not in the Great Books.

The Names That Sound Like Elsewhere

Les Mondes d’Aldébaran arrived in my life the same way. Late high school. The same hunger for beautiful things.

Léo’s art: lush planets teeming with life, planets that we hope Humanity discovers one day. But what really moved me were the names. Robledo. Doesn’t that sound like a beautiful city? Paracelse, Éleutère Géant. La Mantrisse, something “beyond men”. These weren’t just labels. They were music. They sounded like they meant something before you understood what they meant.

The opening panel of the series shows the “Benevides transfert”. I’m not sure about the scientific accuracy of this method of space travel, but “Alvin Benevides” is a beautiful name. The kind of name that makes you feel like you’re somewhere else.

And the paysages. Looking at Aldébaran from space. The immense sea. The alien shore where characters stand and look at something impossible. Melancholy beauty. Worlds in decline or transformation. Human colonies meeting something vast and indifferent.

Music is forbidden on Aldébaran. But there’s a scene where a character named José plays “Waves” by Tom Jobim on the piano. That’s how I discovered bossa nova. I found the album later: Wave (1967), with its perfect cover art, blue and minimal. The connection between the comic and the music and the album art became another thread to follow.

Years later, I read Alain Damasio’s La Horde du Contrevent and got the same feeling. A city called Alticcio. A city of towers built in a mountain pass, one of the last points in “la Bande de Contre”, where the secrets of the world are hidden in a library where all the books are its bricks. I read about Ne Jerkka, his face bent by the “Vif”. Damasio’s imagination stuck. The name stuck.

I named this project Studio Alticcio. A word from a French novel about wind. A city of towers. A library of bricks. That’s where I want it to reside.

What They Share

Frusciante overdubbed himself into an orchestra. Each listen reveals new strata. The Empyrean deserves FLAC.

Léo’s worldbuilding: simple drawings hide complex imagination. The ligne claire style is almost childlike. Simple color palette. The author is not subtle, like Ayn Rand in that way. But the complexity lies elsewhere. There’s an encyclopedia of creatures and worlds Léo invented across his series. You see more detail every time you re-read, not in the drawings but in what they depict. Léo is Brazilian. His aliens are not-Brazil. The same light, the same colonial dynamics, the same sea, but elsewhere. You recognize it without being told.

Though his later work shows fatigue. Bellatrix, the latest series, feels like late Wes Anderson films. You can feel he’s tired. But that’s not why Léo is good. You read despite those limitations, not because of them.

Both works are good to read despite their flaws. Aldébaran for its simplicity and occasional crudeness. The Empyrean for being uncompromising in its vision and too complex to be performed live. Both offer the same thing: melancholic transcendence. Rising and grieving at once.

The Empyrean is about death and ascension. Frusciante made it during a spiritual crisis, returning to music after years of isolation. The album title means “the highest heaven” in Dante’s cosmology. But it’s transcendence through grief, not beyond it. You rise by accepting loss.

Aldébaran is about humanity’s colonial ambitions meeting something they can’t control. Beautiful alien worlds, but always danger underneath. The sublime against a backdrop of violence and mystery. “What could have been” haunts every panel.

I was seventeen, lying in my dim bedroom in the Vosges, headphones on, comic open in front of me. I was trying to transcend my circumstances. Both works promised that if I could just hear clearly enough, see the right colors, learn the beautiful names, I might escape to somewhere better.

I learned to hear stratification. I’m still on Earth.

The Education

This is curation: finding unexpected resonances. Not “if you like X, try Y”, but discovering that two things from different domains gave the same feeling. Following that feeling is how I built my education.

what.cd and /mu/ taught me that serious engagement means following threads wherever they lead. Sometimes that’s Frusciante to Dante (even if Dante disappoints). Sometimes it’s Aldébaran to Tom Jobim to bossa nova. Sometimes it’s Aldébaran to La Horde du Contrevent to the word “alticcio” that named this project. Sometimes it’s finding a motherboard in a dump and feeling elated because now you can build the machine that lets you hear the layers.

My aesthetic education came from elsewhere. For outcasts, by outcasts. Internet subcultures, private torrent trackers, 4chan’s music board, fan sites like Invisible Movement. Being different meant going where “normal” people don’t go.

When I’m honest about the hierarchy of my feelings: Frusciante > Dante. The guitar layers moved me more than the circles of paradise. The comic about alien planets taught me more about beauty than the Divine Comedy.

The cultural accumulation worked. I became someone people wanted to talk to. But I also got lost in my head. I need some sun and steel now, something to bring me back to Earth. But I still carry the taste for stratification. For quality. For names that sound like elsewhere. When Record Collection reissued the album, I bought the vinyl immediately. It felt like paying a debt to the thing that saved me. I named this project after a suspended city from a French novel. I still focus on the bass line in “Central” and rediscover the song.

The works I return to aren’t necessarily the most acclaimed. They’re the ones that stack. That play well together, that create resonances when combined. The Empyrean sounds different when you’ve read Aldébaran. Aldébaran looks different when you’ve heard The Empyrean. That’s the space I want to map.

That’s what Studio Alticcio is for.

—AB