Sound Connection:
The research project
ph©Chiara Pavolucci
CIGLIA
Ciglia is a project by Enrico Malatesta and Attila Faravelli and it consists of a series of simple listening exercises. Instructions to perform these exercises are available on four panels along the trail from Rifugio Abetaia Ranuzzi Segni to Rasora and on a website, which serves as an extension to the project.
The proposed practices are meant to be performed on site along the Via della Lana e della Seta, but they also deal with the following more general matters;
→ The whole body listens to sound, not just the ears.
→ Walking transforms a space. Accordingly, space transforms whoever traverses it.
→ Foreground and background are just conventional notions. Small details in the environment that one might deem insignificant are actually full of gradients and textures.
→ Smartphones can be used to play with changes in the matter and energy that we are immersed in and are a part of.
→ Listening is intrinsically bound to movement. There cannot be any sonic perception without objects and beings vibrating, nor without listening bodies resonating along with them.
→ Most events around us happen at a scale too small or too large, too short or too long for us to be aware of them. Yet these events do exist—they affect us and we affect them; under some circumstances we might even be able to participate in their goings-on.
All walkers should feel free to approach this project according to their own unique physical or sensory abilities. There’s no right or wrong way to execute them, and no previously acquired musical or artistic background is needed.
Please visit: www.ciglia.eu
Ciglia is a project curated by MAMbo - Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna and realised for Via della Lana e della Seta, in collaboration with Unione dei Comuni dell’Appennino Bolognese and CAI - sezione di Bologna sottosezione di Castiglione dei Pepoli. Supported by European Union - NextGenerationEU.
Thanks to Lorenzo Balbi and Caterina Molteni.
Website: Giulia Polenta
Disegni ©Mattia Pajè
Photo ©Chiara Pavolucci
MANICULA
RUDIMENTI
[actions for surfaces and found objects]
RUDIMENTI is an open project, aimed at broadening my personal research on percussion instruments and their surfaces, that will be used in order to explore the relations between sound, space and body, touch-based perception and the vitality of materials to percussive acts. RUDIMENTI comprises multiple trajectories of research whose final output revolves in and around percussion music: from writing texts to the realization of scores/instructions for solo and percussion ensembles, from the practice of listening exercises, to the development of an audio recordings archive in which the surface of skin instruments is documented as field of action. (field recording)
Occam Ocean - Occam XXVI
Occam Ocean - Occam XXVI is an exceptional project, the result of collaboration between Eliane Radigue, French composer, pioneer of the exclusive use of continuous sounds, and Italian percussionist, Enrico Malatesta. Composed in Paris, in August 2018, the piece has been presented worldwide since.
Éliane Radigue stopped producing electronic music and began creating collaborative works with instrumentalists in 2001. Since then, she has produced over 70 works ranging from solos and string quartets to works for orchestra. She began creating Occam Ocean ‒ the series that makes up most of this prolific output ‒ in 2011. The individual pieces share a creative process that relies almost solely on oral and aural transmission: musicians visit Radigue at her apartment in Paris, often returning for multiple sessions before the pieces are completed. Solo pieces are typically based on a combination of pre-prepared sonic materials from which Radigue selects sounds and a water-based image that guides the form of the piece.
• OCCAM OCEAN XXVI – for percussion [2018]
• OCCAM River XXV – for viola and percussion [2021]
• OCCAM River VIII – for violin and percussion [2022]
• OCCAM Hexa IV – for violin, viola, cello, trumpet and percussion [2022]
• OCCAM Hexa VI – for clarinet, tuba, trumpet, saxophone and percussion [2022]
• OCCAM River XX – for trumpet and percussion [2023]
E SôNA
“Farmer, blood of the servant,
your plow is left without music”
E SÔNA (“it sounds” in Romagnolo dialect) is a project by sound artist Enrico Malatesta. Using sound as a means of knowledge and linking elements of Romagna’s folklore and its rural rituals with the territories and communities encountered at each stage of the project, the work investigates the relationship between rural, magic–technology and local beliefs. The research is based on a long-term investigation held my Malatesta on the CAVÉJA DAGLI ANËLL, a shaking sound instrument equipped with tuned metal rings and used in agricultural work and in multifunctional ritual practices, and on the BRONTIDE, an unexplained acoustic phenomenon, similar to the sound of a landslide or an explosion in the sky (in English as skyquakes), nowadays no longer audible, and of which memory has been lost. Malatesta’s intent is to overlap the energy of these instruments and phenomena on the sound characteristics of the encountered working field and community: the final aim is to go beyond the conceptual boundaries of local culture and transfer the vitality of identity and popular sound habits and beliefs in the contemporary fields of music and performance.
E SÔNA has been supported by Xing, Pollinaria AIR, Q-o2 workspace for experimental music and sound art, Liminaria. Image edit ©
ronta
“My grandfather is a farmer, radio amateur and an accumulator. I can recognize his way to accumulate very common through the people of his age that come from the rural area; the aim of the accumulation is totally functional toward preserving fragments, iron, wood and all the components of electrical and mechanical devices that can be used to fix malfunctions of the machines and tools used in the agricultural field. Nonetheless,I noticed that he has a slight attraction to sounds and sometimes he reassembles things creating rudimental sound-devices that are scattered in the field and that start to be used by my family – and the people reaching home to buy vegetables and fruits – like entertainment and/or sound signals”.
TRUCK HORN.
CYMBAL: an old and very cheap cymbal that I bought in a flea market (more than 15 years ago) and that I had trashed in the garbage. I found this cymbal in the field in the summer of 2016, reassembled with a system of suspension made with a car belt, two screws and a rusty iron knocker. The cymbal and the knocker, in that condition, are let free to move on the wind spreading small sounds by touching one to another. My grandfather hung the cymbal because when he hears its sound he remembers me and the time when I was playing the drums all the day in his shed. My grandmother, on the other hand, has started to beat it as loud as possible in order to advise to my grandfather when the lunch is ready: she is tired to shout at him every time.
RADIO.
LILY STAR
Copies are available from Lorenzo Senni’s PrestoRecords.
Graphic and Layout © Bianca Schick
SOUND SPACE BODY
Under contruction
Aural tools
Aural Tools uses small runs of simple objects to document the material and conceptual processes of specific musicians’ sound production practice. It is a series of devices for relating sound to space, the listener and the body in ways unavailable through traditional recorded media such as CDs or LPs.
The releases I worked on for Attila Faravelli’s AURAL TOOLS are available:
• BILIA
• PIETRA DI LANGA with a text by anthropology Tim Ingold.
i lift
one stone
and i am
thinking
[Robert Lax – new poems, 1962]
Thanks to the permission from the ROBERT LAX LITERARY TRUST I have officially started to work on a new, long-term project, revolving around the beauty of ROBERT LAX’s poems. Robert’s portrait has been taken at Staatsgalerie in Stuttgart, in 1985, by ©Judith Emery.
Nuova Superficie
Nuova Superficie is an electro-acoustic sound project by Giovanni Lami and Enrico Malatesta is based upon horizontal actions in progress, that slowly change and melt over the course of the performance. Sound originates from several speakers and – in general – from different diffusion points, amplified or not, analog or acoustic, in a non-referential movement. The one and only need is to produce a simple sound-mass, seemingly static but unceasingly evolving through the labour of the musicians. They use their own instruments (as form and gesture) mainly on the surface, moving objects and working upon the skin of an amplified snare or directly in contact with the tape of the reel-to-reel recorder, trying to activate what is already present there but quiescent.
The aim is to realize a complex sound-space where each listening-experience can be free to evolve and wander and get lost. The sound is made from several diffusion points and is defined by sounds on the cusp of a dense texture, really homogeneous yet rich in detail and micro-perturbations. This non-stop negotiation between details on the horizon and the horizon itself, this lack of balance, and the interaction with the space hosting the performance is the base of this project, that could be considered as something in between electroacoustic music and site-specific action.
ELEMENTI
Elementi is a festival dedicated to contemporary music and performing arts whose intent is to present to the public the transversality of contemporary languages in relation to the emotional power of symbolic and uncontaminated landscapes of the Romagna region. The project is curated by
