After a long period of non activity, quite some
years ago, I ran into some young musicians whose music I defined in this blog
as ‘Post-AvantGarde’. I meant this cats were experimenting from a crypt, or a
laboratory. When I heard such musicians as Umberto Tricca or Paolo Sorge, on
one hand I was feeling the urge to create new music and experiment with new
sounds from the vast palette of the contemporary and improvised music of the past
decades, but on the other hand that in-yer-face feeling coming from the 1980s
and 1990s NY movement near John Zorn et similia was completely lost. I suspect
younger musicians are unconsciously ashamed of being experimental and don’t
enjoy themselves like a Zeena Parkins or a DJ Spooky. And that means a lot:
after all, enjoying yourself is a political act of resistance in this
conservative world.
In fact I had in my ear music created with
accuracy and taste, but too conscious of the past and less free to be itself. A
totally different approach I felt for the music matter of not younger and
navigated musicians like the vibraphonist Sergio Armaroli, who’s last creature,
the quartet with trumpet player and vocalist Phil Minton, drummer Roger Turner,
and trombonist Giancarlo Schiaffini, I had the opportunity to listen live
onstage last sunday, in the space of L’Arsenale, a school of theatre I’m
attending to as a student and that is famous and well known since it’s a school
founded by Jacques Lecocq, one of the last surrealists, friend and disciple of Antonin
Artaud and master, between others, of Dario Fo and many others actors and
performers from Italy.
The space is an old deconsacrated church,
so there’s a great acoustic space for musicians to perform and actors to play.
And, what about the music? The quartet played a dense, sensitive and
diversified set, full of a complex and constant intertwining of different
layers of sound matter. It’s not a complete unknown or original shape of music,
even if the comparison that came to my mind was that with Lettrism (Isidore
Isou movemente well represented through the movie “Traité de Bave et
d’étérnité”), another younger musician talked to me about some months ago in a
correspondence through email.
To that younger guy I was telling to diversify,
intensify and make his music for drums and electronics less monochord. He
answered to me a little disappointed telling me to listen to the lettrist
poets, not knowing I was aware yet of that poetic current of artistic
expression. Diversification, intensity and variety I deeply appreciated during
the live set of Armaroli and his pals. The only little disappointment was for
the voice, a little covered by the other instruments most of the time. I don’t
know if it’s me, habitué of Diamanda Galàs performances, or if the space given
to Minton was restricted for unknown reasons.
I obviously admired the courage of four
navigated musicians whose non idiomatic interplay and musical structures were
put in front of the audience in a place like Italy and in a year like 2022, a
space and time clearly not good for those who love adventures and
non-conformism. I obviously hope to hear possible new evolutions of such music
in the future, and I hope for all of you they will issue live or studio
material soon. After all, we desperately need artistic gestures that can open
up for new feelings and visions in a square and narrow world as the one we’re
living right now, before it’s too late. Try to reach these musicians and their
live performances when they will be near you.
Those of you who are familiar to this blog are
still aware of the interesting even if somehow bothering parade of electronic
music and musicians that takes place every year at the San Fedele Auditorium in
Milan. Bothering because sound is not always perfect, some choices – not only
about the musicians involved, but also about how music is presented,
acoustically speaking – are questionable and if you want to know more you can
read my review of Eliane Radigue concert last year at this
link.
But more important, yesterday night I attended
a couple of performances one of which less interesting and the other one very
cool. Let’s start with the worse: Mattia Loris Siboni, born in 1996, winner of
a San Fedele prize in 2019, presented his work “In Memoriam Hieremiae
Prophetae” (i.e. “In Memory of the Prophet Jeremiah”). For those of you who
don’t know the story, and trying to make it as short as possible, Jeremiah
opposed the political power of his time during the war against Babylon, and for
that reason was immersed in the mud into a tower.
Siboni mixes in this work field recordings and
ascensional melodies, indicating the prophet was saved by the pity of an
Ethiopian councillor of the king, Ebed-Mèlech and taken outside the mud. So we
heard for half an hour the ascensional melody interspersed with the field
recordings: a not particularly brilliant solution to be honest, a little bit
boring and lacking a dynamic development. Even the use of the field recordings
is too simply descriptive, to be honest. I believe Siboni deserve to be
recognized as a composer, but sometimes the urgency to communicate a story or a
message kills the music or affects the way a given musician tells his own
story.
Luckily, the same didn’t happen with Francisco
Lopez. Another disciple of Pierre Schaeffer and the idea of ‘musique concrète’
(i.e. concrete music), Lopez presented a work titled aptly “Inner Sound”, where
the field recordings taken into the Amazon forest were interspersed into an
industrial sonic landscape. Here the dynamics of sound were not only
interestingly realized, but also imagined. As an example, for a couple of times
(e.g. the passing from the industrial to the equatorial lanscape) we faced a
sound that was increasing its volume not vertically but horizontally, in the
face of the audience.
For the sake of the record, I have to admit
that at the end of the performance part of the audience were discussing about
whether Francisco Lopez was developing a way of thinking about the music or
presenting a mere reproduction of past glories of concrete/industrial music. I
really believe that the grace and the mastery we heard were solid gold, and
that Lopez deserves to be taken as one of the most intriguing electonic
composers nowadays.
Francisco Lopez for almost forty years has
developed his own sonic universe, trying with success to destroy the boudaries
between industrial music and environmental sounds creating a sonic world of his
own. Working in almost seventy countries of all the continents, he realized
works, many or which are available through his Bandcamp page, including music
created with sounds taken from both artificial (i.e. human-built) and natural
environments, and his idea of music is so open that the listener is taken as
the last but not the less important ring of the creative chain, so to speak.
In fact, Lopez believes, as Ludwig
Wittengstein, that every work of art need an end-user, a listener, who will
give the work its final but partial meaning thanks to his senses and
connections he’ll be able to create between what he’ll listen to and a possible
sense. Wittengstein is more explicit than that: he declared that every work of
art changes meaning thanks to every user every time it is enjoyed. I believe
Lopez wouldn’t disagree with that.
As far as me, the sense I gave last night to Lopez’
work was that of a discovery: in fact, I was more fascinated by the industrial
sounds, with its far echoes, the circular and slow rhythms, than by the
analogic and natural ones. Not a surprise since I live near a big city, but I
really asked myself if the first group of sounds, the industrial ones, are more
interesting to be manipulated while the animals and the rain are in a way more
penetrating.
That is to say, maybe, that industries are part
of a fascinating trip nowadays, as if the dream of the contemporary composers
has become true, while the nature is still wild and indomitable, more dangerous
for us as individuals and maybe as species. That’s why not all we are implied
in fighting against the global trauma of the climate change: we have relocated
ourselves during the eras, so as far as we are from nature, we can’t really
understand her. At least, not the majority of us.
More prosaically, obviously the industrial
sounds are more regular and dark than the sounds of nature, more organic but
also more accidental. We do know what to expect in an abandoned factory, and
that’s part of its charm, but we don’t know what to expect in a rainforest, and
that’s why it can be really scary. So, many of us will continue to live in
alienating cities instead that in warm nature. A pessimistic message, but don’t
bother Francisco Lopez for that: blame it on myself only.
The review “Inner Spaces” will continue on
April 8 with Syntax Ensemble and on May 2 with Otolab and Marta De Pascalis.
There is also space for the Responsories of the Holy Week on April 10 – we’re
talking about a review promoted by the Catholic Church after all – and for
cinema, with the projection of the movie “North by Northwest” by Alfred
Hitchcock.
