commissioned radio productions
Valerio Tricoli – “A Sicilian Tape”
TX: Tuesday, 29th August, Midday – 12.30pm + Thursday, 31st August, 6pm – 6.30pm
An acousmatic composition.
A note from Valerio Tricoli:
Among the alleys of Palermo – the city where I was born – fragility, poignancy and beauty intersect in a unique way. The ruins of civilization, stabbed in the bowels of an earth that burns mysteriously, stand as asynchronous reminders of a history of art, and violence.
They are also the ruins of someone’s adolescence, and of love stories stolen in soundproof rooms, while someone died of cancer just beyond the wall.
On the shoreline, overshadowed by the hollowed-out rock of Palaeolithic caverns, the dried, elongated, black seaweed are fragments of magnetic tape, talking to those who are malicious enough to hear.
At funerals one cries, it is certain, in Palermo one cries much more, despite everything. So that emotions can more intensely dig indelible furrows in the mind, and be elevated to the purest philosophy, and the explosions become discourse.
I made this track in the spring of 2023, manipulating the sounds, music, voices, directly on analogue tape.
Valerio Tricoli (Palermo, 1977) is a composer and performer of electro-acoustic music, currently residing in Munich.
Since the mid ’00 is main instruments for live presentations is the Revox B77 reel-to-reel tape recorder, used as a completely analogue device for live sampling and real-time transformation / editing / mixing of prerecorded (field or studio recordings) and made-on-the-spot sound sources, the latter usually being vocalizations (including speech and singing), acoustic and electronic instruments, objects, and – in the case of group sets – whatever is produced by the fellow musicians.
On a formal level his sets focus on the impromptu creation of a narrative which takes into account the multiple relations intervening between reality, virtuality and memory during the acoustic event: sounds are always hovering between the “here and now” of the concert situation and the shady domain of memory – distant but at the same time present like in a deja-vu experience. Privileging fracture over continuity and by the use of a dynamic range that could often jump suddenly from near-silence to extreme blasts of sounds, an almost tactile feeling of brooding tension is often attained.
His electro-acoustic studio compositions are aligned to the tradition of Musique Concrète and explore themes of the internal – represented both by the psychological and the physical – and of the occult, which together with the large use of spoken text makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the psychological, emotional and irrational horror within.