THE VERGE OF RUIN - Learn To Love Solitude

Championing the creation and experimentation of (para-)musical languages outside the traditional promotional circuit: that could sum up the mission of Italian label Setola di Maiale, a true institution, and not only for its 25 years of history. It attracts artists who still hold a pure idea of creative expression, confident of reaching the audience for research music while keeping economic concerns in the background.

Under these auspices, the production of The Verge Of Ruin begins. The duo, formed in late 2015 by Stefano De Ponti and Shari DeLorian, are emerging sound artists from the Milanese scene. The gestation of "Learn To Love Solitude" began more than a year ago, and arrives here in its final form at just 20 minutes. There's no need to call it an EP, since it's a perfectly self-contained composition, inspired by the practices and pioneering electronic works of the great avant-garde composers of the twentieth century, from the French school of Schaeffer, Xenakis and Parmégiani, to our own Nono, Berio and Maderna.

In the same spirit of adventure, The Verge Of Ruin sets a conceptual destination but takes many possible routes to reach it, reworking and combining impressions drawn from other art forms in pursuit of an idea of absolute sound, meaningful in and of itself.

Assemblages of field recordings, glitch-noise grime and elusive acoustic percussion blend and blur together from the very first moments of the piece, which abandons any descriptive intent to manipulate its sound sources as raw, searing material. At the fifth minute, a diaphanous heartbeat is crossed by long trails of cello, while a menacing drone makes its way through and warps into thick rivulets of digital sludge. A crackling radio silence rises like a storm whose clouds part to reveal a choir of disordered voices, followed by a brief interruption that ideally splits the track in two.

Less turbulent and more contemplative is the recovery, with a sequence marked by a kind of dark trip-hop that crumbles and builds into rough, noisy distortions; from their dark-ambient ashes, finally, emerges one last tender female voice over a ritualistic drumbeat, evoking at once a romantic epilogue in the manner of Andy Stott.

In its current state, the excellent control of the elements and the ambition do not make up for a vision that, understandably, has not yet arrived at a fully defined identity as a whole. Compressing the time factor is a far from trivial choice and a bold challenge that would be worth repeating, channeling the energies toward a more effective synthesis of the sonic materials.

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11/01/2018