“It forms slowly, through the refraction of light. It penetrates and breaks it down, radiating the listening space among the windows oriented to the spring sun. Oblique plates, breath and transparencies. Stillness. Sound prisms.”
'Prisma' is the first solo album from Italian composer Luigi Turra on 901 Editions, despite his long-term relationship with the label and appearances on various collaborations and compilations: 'Ma 間' with Fabio Perletta (2020), 'Kailash' with Shinkei (2016) and the piece 'Ki IV' (2016) for the series 'Quark: How Does The Invisible Sound?'.
Three years after 'Fukinsei', his latest solo album released by the Japanese label mAtter, Turra further develops his sound path, free from compromises and inclined toward radicalism. With Prisma, he continues to stylise his personal electroacoustic research, through a renewed reductionist guise in which corrosive metallic abrasions placed on the proscenium are retracted as sudden caesuras to leave space for rarefied and distilled piano styles, close to the most essential Ryūichi Sakamoto.
'Prisma' transfigures the sound images through an elegant impulse of refractions, consisting of sound / pause / noise that originate from silence and that are reabsorbed into it, through iridescent elliptic tensions.
A silence that reveals itself as suspension and antithesis to the suffocating fullness of language in order to trace a sound idiom, a balance between action and expectation.
The articulation of the elements is intimate, suspended and the logic of the combinations/juxtapositions subjectively unfolds in the progressive listening experience through an incorporeal diffusion, resolved in sound textures that dig out matter to highlight its residues.
Inspired by Georges Perec's lipogrammatic novel “La Disparition”, written without the use of the letter e. The music score and its interpretation reflect constraint as a process. The score is dedicated to Reinier Van Houdt.
‘Leaving’ is a generative four-loudspeaker composition created for Skanu Mežs by Marina Rosenfeld and Ben Vida, who perform as a duo and have recorded two albums in recent years, ‘Feel Anything’ and ‘Vertice’. Drawing from both records as well as a remote performance that was filtered through the empty volume of New York’s Fridman Gallery during the hot summer of the city’s Covid-19 quarantine, ‘Leaving’ is the artists’ meditation on the absence and presence, fragmentation and drift of our present reality — “a strange dialogue, dreaming of each other through communication of another order… (François Bonnet on ‘Vertice’)”
Dust Bunnies is Giovanni Di Domenico's first solo release for 901 Editions. Recorded in Oude Kerk Charlois with the majestic 1784's Hess pipe organ and in Klangendum / Worm studio in Rotterdam, the album beautifully merges acoustic and synthetic sounds. As pressurized air flows through the pipes, the music reminds us of desertic wind, evoking introspective passages and expansive panoramas from above where large clumps of dust are destined to roll endlessly.
From Steve Roden:
"gradual small fires (and a bowl of resonant milk), was commissioned by the university of hong kong’s new media school, and more specifically, the work was created initially for daniel libeskind’s building for the university’s cmc (creative media center). for the grand opening of the building, several sound and new media artists were invited to create works on site.
the work consisted of 5 different pieces – each object constructed of plexiglass, and each sound work anchored by a recording of a fire that i had made in denmark 10 years or so ago. i added sounds (such as bells, rocks, guitar, field recordings), and everything was manipulated, for the most part with analog guitar pedals.
each sound/sculpture was placed in a discreet location, generally a space that seemed to have no use. the pieces were relatively quiet, and the hope was that a student or visitor would happen upon these works accidentally, and that the piece would then offer a diversion.
my goal was to complete a piece for every photo in ruscha’s book.
along with the five works exhibited at the cmc in hong kong, a 6th piece, gradual small fire 5, was commissioned for the exhibition “sound art. sound as a medium of art” at the zkm in karlsruhe."
60-page A5 colour sewn-bound book plus CD in a cardboard wallet.
Edition of 300 copies.
"Un Fiocco Di Neve" (Italian word for snowflake) is one of the possible crystallisations of an ongoing project called Nucleazione (Nucleation), started in 2017 and consisting of the accumulation of over 200 sound files and silences pulled together and randomly overlapped with no control. The five compositions of this album originate from a series of auto-generative methods. Nucleazione is exhibited as an online project where listeners can themselves experiment the non-linear creation of unstable, undefined compositions with no predetermined beginning nor end.