CD – Die Schachtel
It’s not irrelevant that “Death By Water” was recorded on the small island of Giudecca in Venice, even if the distilled threads shine very abstractly and synthetically – a highly imaginative trip among field recordings, effects and multi-faceted patterns, effectively unraveled by Fabio Selvafiorita and Valerio Tricoli, two investigators who aren’t new to weaving digital suggestions of various natures and semantical structures. Things, events, attributions and connections – in the process of understanding a work – always imprint their manifestations, even if in the research spheres they often differ in their true grammatical connections: the nature and quality of the sounds – in this case – are particularly evocative, serial, rarefied and very descriptive at the same time, resulting from a narrative, poetic and sensitive attitude. It’s mostly muffled frequencies, enigmatic sound signals, echoes and fluid sound emergencies, recorded and then manipulated in a studio. Obscure vocal threads are added, alongside overlapping fluidities and jumps, evoking improvisational lyricisms, post-production technicalities and acousmatic refinements. Successions, eddies, sound gusts and ambivalent moods infect the virtuosities of “Death By Water” – a title with clear reference to Eliot’s work, an author equally at ease with strange and “desolate lands”. A gain and a loss in the evocation of the verses of “The Waste Land” proudly breaks into whispers, intense virtuosities and falls: water purifies sins but at the same time it can bring a slow and painful death.