In stock
CD
SEC_
“Mefite”
Composed, recorded, mixed and mastered by SEC_ between 2014 and 2015. Voice by M.DellaMorte. Words from Peter Liechti’s film “The Sound of Insects”, inspired by M. Shimada’s book “Diary of a mummy”. Premiered in Napoli as a live multichannel diffusion for several radios and speakers, with live voice. Thanks to Stefano Perna for radio broadcast technology and to M.DellaMorte for inspiring the concept.
Mefite is an Italic Goddess venerated in central and southern Italy, especially in the Irpinia Region. Goddess of fertility, she presides over the passage from life to death. Tremendous Goddess who has her cult-place located in the Ansanto Valley, the mortal moat, where horrible gas emissions coming out from a cave, carried by the wind, kill who goes too close.
A mortal air that governs the complex articulation of this cult: to ingratiate the Goddess it is forbidden to come too close to her, because you could die; to go through the Netherworld, instead, the same caution is requested, because the Death could enter the lungs before the way through is reached.
Through the words of “Diary of a mummy”, that already inspired the dearly departed film maker Peter Liechti, it was possible to approach this mysterious and unsettling subject. Here the passage between “this and the other world” is described almost literally, through the detailed diary of a death by starvation. A kind of suspension in the middle of the two, where death hits without a single touch, but, in doing it, gives also the opposite of what desired: nightmares instead of peace, pain instead of relief. A challenge that invites to move forward, towards the unfathomable zone that divides Life and Death.
12,00€
Out of stock
CD
SEC_
“Moscaio”
Composed, edited and mastered by SEC_ between December 2010 and September 2011 using: Revox tape recorder, computer, no-input feedback, field recordings, radio, microphones and pick-ups. The first version of this piece has been produced in the framework of the serie “A short guide to becoming-bat”, curated by Stefano Perna for ORF Ö1 Kunstradio - Radiokunst in 2011. “Long time before humans began to exploit the properties and the uses of the electromagnetic spectrum, animals had already developed a sophisticated system for the manipulation of waves and the transmission of sound signals for the purpose of communication and orientation. Ethologists and natural scientists have shown that many species of animal like dolphins, whales and insects live into an undulatory space made of signals and calls, of frequencies and amplitudes, a radically temporalized space, a pulsating space, that constantly changes, evolves, expands and contracts.
But what an insect feels ? How does it perceives the environment, itself, the other living beings ? Science, on one side, can give us some answer in the form of concepts and theories; this way we can understand the process. Music, on the other side, can assemble for us swarms of perceptions that drag our senses and bodies toward zones where man and insect become indiscernible; there, we are affected by the process. In that region, one is suddenly caught in a becoming-animal that alters its organs, environment, space and time. It let us enter into a waveform space, whose geometry is unknown, a kind of non-human spatiality populated by forces and signs to which our perceptual system is not correctly attuned.
This is the way this composition works. No naturalistic descriptions, no documentary impulses, no metaphoric translations. Here we have a contraption. And, like all machines, this device doesn’t ask to be read or interpreted. You have to activate it, to put it into work, so it can start extracting from your body ways of perceiving of which you were not aware. An insect body appears: weight loss, oblique speed, exhausting slowness, entangled spaces. A shift in the umwelt happens: an imperceptible and obscene sensorial universe comes to the senses, done of buzz, drone, tiny sounds, sudden appearances, unpredictable trajectories and sharp movements.
But these sounds are very far from any desire of reproduction, a simplistic acoustic mimesis of the natural world. Everything here comes from a deeply altered technical world.
In fact, unlike all machines, this device avoids functionality, it works through series of faults: the ambiguous analog autoeroticism of no-input feedbacks, the uptake of radio signals, interferences, the unauthorized excavation of electromagnetic fields, quirky bits of digital data, all stuffed into shreds of tape abominably manipulated. All communication technologies, once designed to preserve information and to exchange watchwords, are brought to the threshold of collapse. And now they start talking an unprecedented language: a nomadic population of traces and marks that, like a swarm made of millions of flying hungry insects, flutter rapidly in the space, than suddenly flock around a piece of meat and then, again, dissolve into chaos”. (-) Stefano Perna
10,00€