Tom Arthurs & Alberto Novello ‎– Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V

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CD – Setola Di Maiale

Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V is presented in a elegant folding glazed paperboard with photos on both sides. The artwork is due to Erin McKinney. The project is an important addition to the catalogue of Setola di Maiale, an independent label, focusing since 1993 on the promotion and diffusion of unconventional music. The release is due to the partnerships between Alberto Novello, multimedia artist, programmer and digital sound-artist, and Tom Arthurs, composer and trumpet player. Since the beginning, the soul of this music confrontation is easily decodable, based on scratchy concatenations of wind instruments. The many dense and moody passages make the atmosphere very intriguing. This is not enough: the sound sources are numberless and also harsh, full of creaks, snorts, continuous pulses, hisses, trills, tickings, backwashes and thousands of other elements the Italian experimenter, also knows as JesterN in the audio-art circle, has in his personal broad background. Nobody would be surprised if the more open-minded lovers of improvisational music or new jazz might have found the duo worthy of interest. The recordings are the last stop of a summer residence organized by ArtOMI in Ghent and New York. The aim of the event was the creation of relationship between style methods and international music experiences. The electronics on play seems analogue. In the second recording the substance undergoes a nervous condensation, full of glitches and trumpet interventions, first limited and later mixed with accuracy. Everything becomes cinematic and alien, the atmosphere makes you feel like you are in some kind of futuristic noir film. The different interventions of the two artists are so intense and decisive as they are moving parallel on the same way, never having an open contrast of timbres, rhythms and phrasings. The single parts come together raw and sophisticated: abstractions and harsh audio emergencies, repetitions and variations, moments of urban lyricism and scattered schizoid equipment. If some vintage free form style is performed with awareness, the goal is still the confrontation with new different styles, given that an unconventional approach requires a deep knowledge of what the history of music has made so far.

 

Tom Arthurs & Alberto Novello ‎– Cahier De Petits Coquillages Vol. IV/V