Nurse With Wound

A stylish, substantial close to the International Feel festival, which brought a choice selection of projects to the Tuscan capital: Alva Noto, Mouse On Mars and Fennesz, to name a few.

Steve Stapleton has always kept a strange, elusive compositional profile, managing to fuse various elements organic to his era within his experimental research. From beginnings rooted in industrial aesthetics, through collaborations with artists from contemporary music, neofolk and the most deconstructed dark-ambient, he has arrived at the crafting of sophisticated textures: conceptual ambient weaves that carve out concrete episodes and existential reflections, as on the penultimate "The Rupture", centred on the mental phases of the passage into death.

A psycho-metaphysical excursus that the English artist chose to bring to the stage specifically for the Florence date, through a form of semi-improvisation that also draws on his latest release, that "Cabbalism" which revisits the Dadaist forms of "Soliloquy For Lilith".

The result is a superstructure of messages that begins almost silently. Brooding and introverted, it slowly reveals itself, raising its own reverberations and distorting frequencies with a dying slowness, while the visuals show the still image of a windscreen wiper in the rain. Then memories and flashes creep in, carousels and faces, glimpses of life and smiles, dreamlike tears of vital fragments that heighten the emotional tension up to a suffocating climax.

This is where the muscular side opens up. The spasms and nightmares intensify until they reach a jarring cacophony: totality achieved through implosion, its own death in a thaumaturgic silence.

Although the museum's structure understandably couldn't allow for excessively high volumes, or in any case a more invasive amplification, the sound's capacity to seep into the space was very profound. The statues surrounding the English artist and his collaborators vibrated in tune with the music's emotional flows, giving us an almost total interpretation: an emotional, nervous microcosm laid out before us.

Nurse With Wound was undoubtedly the perfect project to close out an International Feel edition full of creativity and a desire to experiment.

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