MARTA SALOGNI & STEFANO PILIA - Phren

The third release in the Opale series curated by Maple Death in collaboration with publishing house Canicola Edizioni brings together, for the first time, Marta Salogni and Stefano Pilia. On one side, Revox tape machines; on the other, electric guitar. In between, a complex system of filtering and manipulation that fuses the compositional process and the recording process into one. Not a sum of two voices, then, nor even their stratification, but rather a whole designed to generate a mechanism in constant evolution.

It falls to the illustrations of Sarah Mazzetti to offer the suggestive imagery for the duo's work, conceived as a unified flow divided into six movements whose sequence of titles opens up a further narrative layer.

sopra l’acque scavate
dove mettersi un vento
muti nell’attesa
la memoria vacilla
ma la mia anima è testimone
e il mio fiume scorre verso te, oh mare, accoglimi

Absence, overcoming, memory: these are the concepts underpinning structures built from an idea developed by injecting the trajectories of the six strings into the system of machines that Salogni herself calls the labyrinth. Delay, loop, accumulation loop, feedback are applied in a way that makes the sound not redundant but constantly different, deformed and in partial decay. An operation that leads to a sense of the evanescence of memory, inevitably linked to Disintegration Loops by William Basinski.

Pilia's guitar paints the contours of emotional landscapes echoing the lesson of Robert Fripp's Soundscapes – an acknowledged reference – while the filtering process applies the grain that gives substance to pure abstraction, an art whose undisputed master is Christian Fennesz. The result is an ambient record with hauntological traits, a man-machine combination that doesn't subtract warmth but amplifies it, reaching a peak of solemnity in its closing section, marked by fragments of "Lamentations of Jeremiah" by Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.

“Phren” is a complex journey, built with care and an acute awareness of its own means. A listen that demands attention, calling on the sensory potential of deep listening to fully reveal, through sound, an imaginary world triggered by grief and projected toward its overcoming. Simply moving.

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14/10/2026