Lo Best
[walking bucket-heads]

New Listening workshop 

"Lo Best" is a listening workshop inspired by a scene from the film “Encounters at the end of the world” by W. Herzog (2007): to simulate the extreme weather conditions of Antarctica during a survival course, the instructor has participants wear white buckets on their heads as devices to reproduce conditions of limited visibility and hearing difficulty, while they have been asked to solve simple logistic problems. Starting from this suggestion, buckets will be used to create sensory limitations as well strange characters who, wearing the object, will be asked to "follow" some sound signals and to cooperate in finding their locations in the space. The sound signals will be played with some portable loudspeakers whose sound activity will be disturbed/covered Malatesta himself through the percussive use of other buckets, strangely echoing the styles of “bucket-drumming”.


drawing©Sean De Coux aka Salvatore Andrea Della Corte

 

Hand Clapping
in the area around the symbol.

Listen
to the acoustic phenomena
that emerges from the energy of your hands.

 

Eco
Reverberation

Appears and decays
in different configurations
embedded
in the background noise
of the city.

Stay still, or keep walking.

 

The symbol indicates an area of observation.

It indicates the presence of particular interactions of light with surfaces.
The invitation is to gradually focus on minimal patterns of interaction that capture your attention by imposing themselves on the context.

The symbol invites a long-term, time-dilated observation by returning to the area several times, at different times of the day or on different days, within a limited period.

The memory overlaps with the present, defining the changes of the context through the light.

MANICULA

Manicula is an artistic research format by ENRICO MALATESTA and CHIARA PAVOLUCCI. It is aimed at combining practices involving image and sound in relation with the themes of CITY and WALKING, with a CALM DRIFT that connects different URBAN SPACES and TERRITORIES in a common network.

Manicula consists in a collection of ACTIVE LISTENING and OBSERVATION EXERCISES aimed at investigating the acoustic and visual phenomena present in some parts of the city; the areas of activation of the practices are not declared, but indicated by reference symbol. The project is a kind of TREASURE HUNT and it does not require the presence and mediation of a performer/artist/guide. Each individual decides how to undertake the search for symbols and how to use the available scores to investigate, on the one hand, the relationship between SOUND AND SPACE through the use of the body and, on the other hand, the observation of VISUAL PHENOMENA related to the movement of light and its interaction with surfaces/layouts of the city. Manicula also invites people to continue the exploration by enriching it with their own personal research. No specific knowledge or skills are required to try the proposed exercises.

Manicula is an OPEN PROJECT that also includes live performances, workshop as well as a visual and textual JOURNAL that documents the research and the WALKING PATHS carried out in situ by the authors.

www.manicula.it

All photos©Chiara Pavolucci

 
 

percussion
[actions for surfaces and found objects]

Percussion 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. "Percussion" 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)

 



 

annotazioni superficiali

Annotazioni Superficiali is an ongoing collection of listening exercises, scores and texts. It consists in the transcriptions of my personal journal, revolving around my experiences in the field of performing arts, music/musical instruments and sound ecology. LINK



Locations: 1st ph_
Pialassa della Baiona, Ravenna IT // 2nd ph_Riserva Naturale Speciale della Bessa, Biella IT


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. 

 

Enrico Malatesta's repertoire within the Occam Ocean series:

• 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.

• ph_Caveja from the collection exhibited at MET – Museo degli Usi e Costumi della Gente di Romagna, Santarcangelo di Romagna - Rimini. Fo.Cu.S. Fondazione Culture Santarcangelo – Musei Comunali Santarcangelo.

• E SÔNA has been supported by Xing, Pollinaria AIR, Q-o2 workspace for experimental music and sound art, Liminaria. Image edit©Habitatt 

E SÔNA_pdf

Se siamo assenti suonare qui

"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".

 

 

Tools:

• 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

Lily Star is a selection of modified texts, anthropological annotations, anecdotes, fake names and speech fragments collected and then assembled by the author during several years of employment as a fireworks seller. The fieldwork was then expanded through internet-based researches; the aim of the book is to present a flow of information concerning the socio-cultural and ecological implications, the rhetoric of trade, the rules, the semantic aesthetics of nomenclatures and descriptions, the aberration of use of fireworks and the sound & light synesthetic presence of pyrotechnics in different contexts of celebration and entertainment. Far from proposing a finished project the book is the starting point for a series of sporadic interventions dedicated to fireworks using different formats: lectures, readings, listening sessions. Lily Star is a stage for the ephemeral power of fireworks and its transfer from the sky to the medium of text.

Copies are available from Lorenzo Senni's PrestoRecords.

Graphic and Layout©Bianca Schick

SOUND SPACE BODY

under contruction

Aural tools

The releases I worked on for Attila Faravelli's AURAL TOOLS are available:

BILIA
PIETRA DI LANGA with a text by anthropology Tim Ingold.

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.

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.

 


I LIFT ONE STONE AND I AM THINKING_press ITA_pdf

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 MAGMA and MU in collaboration with the Municipality of Cervia, Cesenatico, Faenza and Unione dei Comuni della Bassa Romagna.

Saline di Cervia ph © Chiara Pavolucci