CARLO DOMENICO VALYUM - Cronovisione italiana

At times, surrendering to imagination, or even to a good-natured deception, is a conditio sine qua non for approaching a work in the right spirit. Nobody expects you to take seriously the preposterous story of Carlo Domenico Valyum (1891–1989), a para-futurist pioneer of research into electromagnetic waves and time travel: it is nonetheless worth indulging this retroactive legend before delving into his “Cronovisione italiana”, a personal archive that Undogmatisch, a Berlin-based label with Italian roots, releases as a limited-edition box set containing two LPs, a CD and a videocassette.

If you are lucky enough, you might find a Wikipedia entry pending approval (highly unlikely) detailing, with abundant specifics and historical references, Valyum's life and inventions, alongside a fine portrait on paper. 

At the end of August 2014, in Berlin, the existence of the suitcase containing material intercepted in 1937 and transferred to VHS tape during the 1970s is accidentally discovered. What immediately becomes clear is that in February 1937 Valyum had intercepted and further recorded electromagnetic waves emanating from future Italian television broadcasts, over a span of time between 1976 and 9 December 1989, the day before his presumed death.

Thus the filter of time, both forward and backward, returns to us in no particular order fragments of broadcasts, interludes and theme tunes that will sound familiar to very few listeners today, such as the countdown to the time signal (“Eurovision”) and the announcement of the numbers drawn in the national lotteries, accompanied by a sequence of minimal-synth in the manner of Cortini (“Estrazioni del lotto”).

Elsewhere we are immersed in crackling distortions and glitches over a cloudy dark-ambient carpet (“Check Up”, “Oretredici”), gloomy cathode-ray reimaginings that could appear only on the screen of a Lynchian nightmare (“Almanacco”, “Fantagerundio”), but also luminous nostalgic flashes (“Carosello”, naturally).

The official clips, with effects that mimic magnetic tape distortions, are also the offspring of recent audiovisual aesthetics of vaporwave, which draws from the recovery of vintage archival material a poetics of recorded non-memories, committed to media in slow decay and destined for the microcosms of oblivion that are our attics and domestic cellars.

Mirco Magnani's project – this is the occult creator's real name – does not yield particularly brilliant results from a compositional standpoint, but it is sustained by a fascinating, all-encompassing concept, in which even the faux-canvas printing bears an appreciable resemblance to the dossiers and artist's books of the early twentieth century.

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

28/02/2018