Shu is not the pure piano any more
It is as I am in these months
It is what winds inside me
It is distance, deep anger, rage and mercy.
It is experimentation.
Some sampling elements are:
- Microtones
- Blocked dynamics
- Rythms
- Total chromatic
- Theremin with real-time processing
- Ligeti's influence elements
- A shot with a Light Gas Gun
This music shows a phase of my research.
The are no arrival points along the double slinting spiral, only shots of the process.
Tracks | Shu Bracelet | Ideogram
00_The Lost Mariner
01_Test200410
02_In the Cracks between the Piano Keys
03_Kaosmosi
04_Tempus Fugit
05_Root
06_Domus
07_Boîte á musique inachevée
08_Diorama Mirror
It's a double improvisation, the synth is in the background. Filtered piano, portamento and pitch wheel.
It's a duet with the storm, the perfect mirror of that cold moment.
The starting point is a delirious Sunday afternoon. The Modplug Tracker fish out.
Obsessive and instinctive percussions.
For a couple of month I walked through Tibetan music, traditional Jewish melodies, also attracted by the Golem. Then I let them settle, some time later I got in contact with the book 'The Art of Noise' of Luigi Russolo and I was enamoured again by the work on intervals smaller than the semitone. The title is inspired by a sentence of Ives.
In this piece there is the use of the eighth tone part and the dynamics are blocked.
Here we have a reverse process, instead of trying to obtain order from a kaotic dimension through a research for symmetries, I want to re-create the kaos from a precise set. It's only a way to place ourselves at the other side of the mirror.
This piece is created following a procedure near to the J.S. Bach's fugues. The spiral subject flows through the drum patterns, that are inspired by arabic rythms used for the belly dance.
The main core is conveyed upon a synthetic gamelan. I used the semitone divided into 100 parts, the resulting sound is the sum of the original frequency plus the frequencies you get following the Fibonacci sequence.
The other core of this piece is vocal improvisations.
All flows through ambient fluxes and synthetic multilayer choirs.
Exotic instruments are the picture frame of the prepared piano, it's an exploded evolution.
The voices are managed in a naïf Bachian way.
A Musical Box give life to the main theme of the Schubert's Unfinished Symphony. This instrument is used to voice the notes that carry to the Total Chromatic.
Metronome at 60 bmp, multilayer sound with 33, 66 and 99 tone's cents overlapped. Every layer has a 5 ms time subtraction. This sound spreads a Crab Canon.
The metronomes' rain is in Ligeti memory, a lead created by me slides under these drops.
Shot by a light gas gun @ 5 km/s. Trust No One intro on an untuned old piano.
Shu will be distributed via a usb key bracelet, the design of the prototype was developed by Cleo's studio, thanks to Iasmin Abou Shareb.
The tracks are in files at 48 kHz – 24 bit and the master, created by Paolo Bernardini, has an acoustic range near to the vinyl discs.
On the earliest known example of Chinese writing, the oracle bone script, shu was shaped as a vegetable, representing a cereal.
While Chinese history was alternating dynasties and emperors, in classical texts shu first became a town's street, a road, then a method, a trick, an art.
Today shu still maintains its main meaning, that combined with other characters can produce a variety of new words and significances.
Shu is art and technology, martial art and sorcery, talent and capability.
Shu is the spark of beauty that characterizes a work of fine art.
On the hands of a good doctor, shu is surgery, the skill to operate patients.
During a war, shu is the military tactic that can tell the winner from the loser.
The capacity of reading the stars' path in the sky: shu is astrology and divination.
When dealing with power, shu offers a political trickery to get rid of opponents.
Witches, demons and supernatural entities are all radiating shu, a magical kind of force.
Shu is the stratagem that, with a good amount of wisdom, will help to get through a bad moment.
And what is arithmetic, if not the shu, the ability to compute?
