Author, composer, and editor-in-chief Fabian Saul on creativity as a process of layering

What is your creative practice?

I’m a composer that writes books and a writer that sings songs. And often these two end up being two sides of the same artwork.

What would be examples of these artworks?

Like the literary audio series I compose, theatre plays I’ve directed, the magazine I co-edit or the novel I just published.

So, you’re not just a multi-disciplinary artist that does different things but you find ways of bringing it all together?

Maybe my practice is a process of layering—of gathering fragments from different places, voices, and times, and allowing them to interweave. At the core, it’s about listening: not only to the sounds around us but also to the voices, memories, and stories embedded in places beyond the most visible dominant layer. When I compose music, I think about how sound can be both singular and collective; each note or rhythm contributes to a larger, shared soundscape. It’s similar to writing. I don’t see my novel, for instance, as a solitary expression; it’s informed by collective voices, by dialogues with other artists and writers, by landscapes, and by the histories they carry.

Ultimately, my practice is about inviting people into this ongoing dialogue, where they can experience the work not just as a finished product but as something that continues to resonate and evolve in their proximity. Whether through music or text, I aim to offer a shared space, one that encourages others to reflect on their own relationships with places, sounds, and each other. I like to think of my work as something communal—something that only becomes complete when it’s experienced collectively.

Could you elaborate on this very beautiful thought?

For me, music and writing are two expressions of the same impulse: to capture and explore something fluid and open-ended, to pose a question in the face of an unjust, worst-of-all-worlds we live in. Just as in music, where the refrain isn’t just a place to return to but also a place for evolving, I approach writing as a way to create structures that invite re-entry, reinterpretation, and resonance. In my novel, Die Trauer der Tangente, there are thousands of possible pages, thousands of pathways. I called the first drafts I shared with my editor “takes” because I saw each draft as just one way of moving through the material, arranging and composing it. I could have structured it entirely differently; the text is porous and open, a work that, in many ways, could keep expanding.

That’s a seemingly endless endeavor…

Initially, I didn’t think I would ever finish the book. It felt almost impossible, because the process was so collaborative and layered. Others believed in the work’s potential, and it’s thanks to them we were eventually able to choose one of those “takes.” This now published version has 328 pages, but it could just as easily have had 100 or 800. Each version would be different, and each would resonate in its own way.

This openness—the idea that a work can be rearranged, reinterpreted, or continued by those who experience it—is also how you think about music?

A refrain in music grounds us, but it also invites variation and reinterpretation with every return. I also look for refrains when I write literature. It’s a form of collectivity: the text is not solitary or fixed, but something that others, including the readers, can enter into, extend, and continue.

Ultimately, I see both writing and music as collaborative acts. They allow me to create work that’s not static but, rather, like an echo moving through different voices and perspectives. In this way, my work is never entirely mine; it’s shaped by those who have faith in it and those who interpret it, people who help carry it forward. Perhaps the book, in the hands of the readers, continues to be written.

You mentioned working daily with ‘failed attempts’ as an artist. If you believe that to be true, where does the drive to keep doing it come from?

I see language as something imposed, something hiding its own power structures, something I’m very skeptical towards, and once you understand the ways in which language forged the worlds we live in, the ways in which it has shaped the framings we live in, you must take its promise seriously – it changes and can be changed. Reality, the built environment, the stories we inhabit also seem solid until they change. The poet Ocean Vuong said, “We are participants in the future of language.” That’s where the drive comes from.

The confidence with which people move through narratives often rely on stories reinforced by dominant power structures, because these narratives are the most visible and repeated. It’s an attempt to reassure, to cover up the actual profound uncertainty. When we confront the complexity of narratives from our own sensitivities, we enter a space that feels far less certain. In that space, we’re immersed in the simultaneity of different layers of time, diverse lived realities, and multiple voices. And within this disorientation lies an opportunity for deep empathy—a respect for the coexistence of varied perceptions and realities beyond the singular, dominant story.

This notion of simultaneity also raises questions of narrative injustice and the violence inherent in forcing stories into a single plot. When we open ourselves to this layered and often disorienting field of human perception, we see just how much is possible for our minds — how many different realities we can accommodate. But we also live in a world that anticipates, manipulates, and even counters these empathetic and imaginative abilities.

We live with capitalist anachronisms, where the future is often shaped before it arrives, where the future is built on expected surplus, which leads to the default existence of exploitative models. Take the fact that we live in homes built on credit by capital owners, with money that must be earned elsewhere. This coexistence of wealth and exploitation is hidden, even when a direct relationship exists. A lack of awareness of these connections has allowed injustices to persist: the violence and number of whip lashes on a Louisiana plantation were effectively decided on the London Stock Exchange, where, simultaneously, human rights might have been discussed without acknowledging the violence. We must realize that our world is still colonial and neo-colonial in that the entanglements persist even if the institutional frameworks have shifted. And it’s these constant subtle shifts in time and space that obscure our view of the causalities and of the bigger picture.

Maybe it’s not a failed attempt; listening to you speak does not sound like you’re describing failure.

What I mean is approximation, approximation for the benefit of allowing language to carry the multitude of realities that are part of any human experience consisting of more than one person.

The idea of the refrain plays an important role here. Refrains aren’t something I place intentionally as repetitive motifs—they’re echoes that have already returned to me, phrases and melodies that I’ve heard over and over, in different contexts, in different times. When a sentence or a melody keeps coming back, I feel a deep sense of trust in that repetition. It’s as if these phrases carry a meaning that’s been waiting to be revealed, surfacing in new configurations and contexts, taking on new meanings each time they return. In writing, these refrains act like guiding constellations, patterns that emerge without being forced, lending the work both familiarity and a mystic quality.

You sometimes feel that writing and living get separated…as in, writing is something one does at a residency or somehow away from day to day life. For you it’s important for writing to happen in your “actual life.”

There’s this bourgeois notion that writing happens in silence, in private, in secluded spaces. That living and writing are two incompatible processes. Most scholarships offer a villa or a remote house, often allowing writers to pretend they are rich. And I do believe that, if we want to go into that fabric of life, into the world we live in and transform it, we have to find sentences or melodies inside of our life and not outside of it.

Your ability to write at any time and anywhere, could be something you learned in your 20 years of having creative practices? Maybe you used to romanticize writing seeing it as something that happens only under ‘perfect’ conditions?

I think the moment you enter the world with curiosity, you understand that not everything has to make sense to yourself and that not every narrative has to be centred around your own perception. That need for soothing plot lines is a violent act of simplifying the world we live in, our own entanglement and also our own complicity in its systems of oppression.

We, the workers in song and language, should never give people the gratification of simplifying the world around them and their own place and complicity in it. Making them endure the multitudes and contradictions, offering not salvation but a deeper questioning is part of the duty.

I think I’ve always had this sense of curiosity. I would say an insecurity of not acting how I thought one should act was very present in my twenties as the overlapping disciplines I’ve been working on were considered indecisive when they felt very intuitive to me. To choose the medium of expression that best translates the concept or idea behind an artwork rather than the other way around when artists fill a pre-fabricated, templated form. But over time, this practice of curiosity I’ve had since I was a child turned out to be stronger than the need to perform within pre-fabricated realms of how one should write or produce or sing.

You make music and you write, but then you also have different practices where you connect the two. How do you connect music and literature, or music and writing?

I often consider what happens to a sentence, a word, or even a thought when it becomes music — when it gains the agency of a voice or, as in my sound work, the agency of multiple voices…I think music can protect a sentence, an expression, the record of an experience we want to share by bringing faith to to table, even just for a moment. It’s something we experience in cinema: we know how profoundly music can change a scene, how it influences the degree to which we believe in or feel moved by what’s happening. While music can certainly be used to manipulate us, it also has the power to hold and guard an idea — to give us the chance to pause, to place our trust in a single sentence, and let it resonate fully.

The moment we read a sentence aloud, we enter the realm of music. Almost everyone has a way of moving beyond words and into music to reach that other dimension. Music creates a space where we can focus our attention, give care, and offer protection to one another. It can recreate a kind of cinematic experience, inviting us to enter a new, unexpected space, to be curious about a sentence, a word, or a thought, and then to immerse ourselves fully and move beyond the visible, explainable, beyond the linear and beyond the foreseeable.

In these moments, something deeply empathetic and intimate emerges — a connection to what feels like the surreal, layered realm of dreams and unspoken emotions. It’s like those brief instances where everything suddenly seems to make sense, where connections become tangible, even if only for a moment.

Sometimes, these moments are dreamt, imagined, maybe even claimed, yet they are still real. They exist in texts, in songs, through the layers of time, and sometimes even in the physical encounters between people. This is the space that I, as a composer and writer, try to create—a space where these fragile experiences can exist safely, perhaps shielded from the forces that might otherwise erase or distort them. And I believe music can hold that space.

This content originally appeared on The Creative Independent and was authored by Grashina Gabelmann.