Massimo TONIUTTI
“The Clear Observatory – Eyepiece Musique”

Massimo Toniutti is an Italian sound designer and experimental musician. He is the brother of Giancarlo Toniutti who is best known for his electroacoustic masterpiece La Mutazione which was originally released on the Broken Flag label in the UK and later re-issued by Klanggalerie. Massimo started working with sound when he was a teenager, collecting and playing recordings of all kinds. In the 1980s he released four cassettes on his own label, all heavily influenced by the experimental music scene of that time. He soon developed a strong relation to electroacoustic structures, space/environment and silence. In the 1990s, he began investigating radio, creating his own sound archive and producing unusual broadcasts. He released an album entitled Il Museo Selvatico, which was re-issued in Australia in 2018 on Oren Ambarchi’s label Black Truffle. A documentation of his radio work can be heard on the CD Le Gabbiette Di Faraday, collecting radio pieces from 1996 to 1998. On his new album, Toniutti deals once more with space and silence with an immersive, spacious long track. A loose-knit sound structure moves in a cyclic but unpredictable way embracing macro shapes, empty spaces and sound dust. While running crystal clear it invites you to observe it in depth and focus on distances. Details/events are spread along the piece like in a landscape, still and changing at the same time. A deep listening that can easily become “my personal musique d’ameublement”, to quote the composer himself. A model of this work has been part of a permanent installation in a museum since 2013. The Clear Observatory is a sort of never ending piece, the enlargement/development of a bunch of seeds. Sound sources (acoustic material and field recordings) are treated in a specific configuration of reverbs and delays to create this roomy “eyepiece musique”.