Amelia CUNI & Werner DURAND
“Diasporagas”

Amelia Cuni was born in Milan and has lived in India for more than 10 years
where she studied dhrupad singing with various renowned masters. Werner Durand has been performing his own music for saxophones, Iranian ney and self-made wind instruments since the late 70s. He started building his own wind
instruments from plexi-glass, PVC and metal tubes in the early 80s and has performed in various groups including The Thirteenth Tribe and Armchair Traveller. For more than 20 years, Cuni and Durand have been performing together as a duo as well as in collaborations such as Tonaliens and Born Of Six.
Diasporagas, sub-titled “Ancient Trends and New Traditions in Indo-European
Music”, summarizes their various musical projects in which her Indian raga singing met with his minimalist and experimental approach. In all of their collaborations, they have been creating unique forms and expanding the palette
of their sound worlds while keeping the essence of raga music, justifying the
use of the term in its original meaning. The title is meant to be understood as
a statement to provoke reflections on our ideas of cultural identity vs.
globalization, and tradition vs. experimentation.
A central Diasporagas work is “Hiss (mastered noise)” for dhrupad singing,
invented wind instruments, Indian percussion and samples of historical recordings by Indian singers. It is partly based on their earlier work “Gramophone Saraswati” which involved replicas of Luigi Russolo’s Intonarumori instead of the Indian recordings. This LP includes “Hiss (mastered noise)” and two other pieces entitled “Aqua Shiva” and “Agana Song”. Edition of 300 in a full-color sleeve with a printed inner sleeve reproducing the score of “Hiss mastered noise”.