INNER_SPACES 2016 - #2

The programme notes for the second instalment of INNER_SPACES rest on a stark contrast: two almost antithetical expressions and “imaginations” of sound art, shaped from raw materials of opposing origin.

The guest of honour for the evening, staged with the support of the Spanish cultural institute Cervantes, is one of the luminaries of field recording worldwide: Francisco López presents the latest of his numerous “Untitled” works, sonic artefacts that are not only free from the characterization – we might say conditioning – of a title, but almost never find an iconographic counterpart on covers or promotional materials, where a black background is often preferred instead.

López's ingenuity is entirely focused on the “capture” and organic reworking of natural acoustic sources, which often end up losing all synesthetic connection with their origin; for this reason the Spanish artist is firmly convinced that the listener is the missing link in the completion of the artwork, since only they can give it an (in)complete meaning in accordance with their own perceptual apparatus. The lengthy piece – roughly an hour long – is specifically designed for the now well-known Acusmonium Sator, the “speaker orchestra” that characterizes much of San Fedele Musica's output.

The audience is thus invited to take part in a ritual. Anyone can do so voluntarily, since the tool provided is the same for everyone: a black blindfold returns us to the original concept of the screen, that is, whatever first obstructs or hinders ordinary visual perception, thereby freeing us from the conditioning mentioned above, from images and imaginings that don't belong to us.

A tabula rasa that's easier said than achieved, since it requires letting go of perceptual coordinates beyond the purely visual – silencing, that is, our awareness of the space we're in, of the objects and people around us who distract us simply by being there, even if they're entirely committed to “silence in the room”.

At first we must accept every intermediate stage, giving free rein even to the most obvious thoughts and images, before reaching a limbo bordering on lucid dreaming: only then, if at first airy sounds suggest the vaults of the heavens, and rough, deep ones the raw physicality of the earth, will a gentle torpor gradually lead us to freely rework the stimuli accumulated over the course of the day.

“Mental visuals” force their way through with difficulty, dismantling cinematic clichés one frame at a time. Beyond them lies the threshold of the unconscious, and even just glimpsing it is an unhoped-for achievement, assailed as we are by information we now recite perfectly from our sensory memory.

It's impossible, as well as pointless, to describe in detail what happened in between. The only vivid memory I retain is of an extremely “physical” final climax, shot through with increasingly invasive vibrations and the ticking of thousands of crazed clocks, my arms heavy as boulders; as the mechanical maelstrom faded away I saw – literally, in the dark between my eyelids and reality – a shapeless, greenish light, like a faint aurora borealis, close in on itself and bring down the curtain just as the speakers faded out.

When the lights came back up in the room, I found it particularly pleasant and meaningful to watch the audience readjusting their eyes and explaining their visions to their neighbours, tracing expanding shapes with their hands and widening their eyes as they described things each of them had experienced in a different, unshareable way.

The second half of the concert is entrusted to the collective Otolab, which, as Don Antonio Pileggi pointed out in his opening remarks, maintains what amounts to an almost permanent artistic residency at San Fedele, presenting each year the fruits of its close collaboration with the Acusmonium as well as ever more advanced digital image-generation processes.

“sYn” is a work divisible into visually self-contained segments, driven by a flow of cautious electroacoustic explorations and natural soundscapes interspersed with sections more properly ascribable to the minimal-techno territories of the current century. Beginning with the elementary, innocuous tracing of a few cesurae on a neutral screen, like light drawings that appear only to dissolve moments later, the young talents of the Milanese “multimedia project” go on to severely test the audience's photoreceptive endurance, bombarding them with negativized fragments of rocky matter alternating at an almost unbearable speed. An undoubtedly impactful exploit, followed first by a viscous liquefaction, like pervasive and uncontrolled karstic phenomena, and finally by a descent through the inner membranes of a pulsing, deep heart, which in the end marks a complete break from the imagery indulged until that point.

A conciliatory close to a two-part programme that once again expresses opposing yet complementary polarities: two eloquent examples of what today constitutes a genuinely experiential event. In effect, concrete proof of the horizons that S/V/N and San Fedele still intend to look toward, in mutual agreement and with strenuous commitment.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google