FRAME - Afo 4

Already active in the field of soundtracks for art exhibitions and films (worth mentioning here is "L'inverno", directed by Nina di Majo), Davide Mastropaolo and Leandro Sorrentino take on a new fascination that continues to explore the boundaries between the visual and the auditory. "Afo 4" is the new project by Frame, presented as a sonic storyline, "scored with images" by Nina Di Majo, who returns the favour with a series of filmic representations designed to conjure suggestions, broaden the perceptual field, and set in motion processes of identification and estrangement.

Electronic music appears here in the guise of enveloping ambient expanses and syncopated beats that emerge like awls within fluid constructions. Nina Di Maio, as mentioned, gives us a delicate post-nuclear love story, set around "Afo 4", one of the towers of the industrial cemetery of Bagnoli, a backdrop perfectly suited to the intent. Bodies that brush against each other, tremble, suffer, relegated to a limbo that is both origin and end, din and silence, absence of life and will to rebirth; and the music flows on. "Nekih Problema" gives rise to the filmic/sonic flow, a hugely powerful piece of ambient music that smears its transparencies with noise and background interference, like memories, the last human testimonies amid the ruins of a collapsed world.

Claustrophobic atmospheres and sustained rhythms come through in the ironic crescendo of "Pon", so ethereally menacing as it accompanies the anguish of those innocent Wenders-like silhouettes at the mercy of near-total sensory void. The sonic minimalism running through the nine tracks is, in the case of "Afo 4", likely a deliberate attempt to make image and sound an inseparable whole, a multisensory, all-encompassing experience. And "Music For A Merged Bubble", though venturing into territory marked by greater sonic concreteness, stays true to that intent, sinking a faint, vaguely Oriental melodic line into an abyss of ambient nebulae, like a Susumu Yokota duetting amid the ice with his majesty Brian Eno.

Still more strong feelings and digital tears in the splendid "From Y To Z", unsettling low-tempo electronics further clouding the scene. Disarming in its ability to bring the synthetic to life, "Afo 4" is a small, understated manifesto on how to love and be loved, to die and be reborn within a post-modern, post-industrial, post-everything-and-nothing society.

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30/04/2026