PAOLO SPACCAMONTI - Border Soundscapes II

The deep synergy linking Paolo Spaccamonti's sound practice to images is well known to anyone who has followed his artistic path. It's an intimate communion between different fields of action, fully perceptible when his writing moves autonomously without external references, and even more evident when it takes cinema, theatre or television as its pretext. His latest production, once again curated by the ever-commendable Die Schachtel, falls into this second category.

It's Bruno Stucchi who sets this interdisciplinary journey in motion. The starting point is 24 shots by Pino Musi, a photographer devoted to depicting urban and architectural landscapes, whose work blends the rigour of rationalism, the rough essentialism of brutalism and the metaphysics of De Chirico's painting. His are snapshots of clean-cut geometry, impeccably selected and crystallised in a sharp black and white of undeniable elegance. The chosen sequence works as a kind of graphic score, to which Spaccamonti — with the full complicity of Gup Alcaro — has responded by building a suite in two movements, one per side of the vinyl, structured as a sum of one-minute-forty-second fragments, each dedicated to a single image. It's a rigorous framework within which runs a thread drawn from several live-recording sessions, only later edited and refined.

The result is a spare journey that combines guitar and electronics in a shifting balance, a whole that keeps its sections recognisable even as it fits them into a seamless, uninterrupted flow. The voice of the instrument emerges clearly, bends, distorts its own timbre, engaging in dialogue with synthetic modulations until it dissolves into them, drawing on the lesson of clear points of reference such as Fennesz and Tim Hecker. This is sound that doesn't narrate the images, but rather aims to render their points of tension, their sense of estrangement, their tears and temporal suspensions.

Synaesthesia is an obvious term here, but also the most fitting one for a work that comes across as complete both as a sum of its parts and in the autonomy of each. It's a virtuous union between complementary fields, one to which the physical form of the object — vinyl plus a nearly four-metre photographic print of the sequence — does further justice. Simply precious.

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20/05/2026