CD – Illegal-Art
Inspired by a seminal text written in the late sixties by Bruno Munari and Davide Mosconi, the turntablist and cut-up artist Filippo Paolini – based in Rome and better known under the moniker Økapi – has created an interesting experimental opera project, surgically operating on 40 different works, with lots of cuts, juxtapositions, joins and improvisational insertions. Its attitude is typically plunderphonic, a compositional style that, even though not really stressing the concept of audio piracy anymore, is still inspired by it. In “Opera Riparata” the operative strategies are nonetheless kept “airy” and all the samples are of a single genre, thanks to a complex production structure that starts with live sessions, subdivided by performance in time segments of the same length (1’11”), to which the necessary manipulations are applied in a studio at a later stage. From “bastard pop” to “bastard opera” the distance is small and the results always unpredictable. In the combination of academic movements and performative starts, something unusual happens: very different strategies influence the spontaneity of the execution and make different stylistic-musical dimensions collide in other non-similar contexts. Finally, the clever use of classical compositions is the common and participatory reagent, because like pop they have a recurrent character that is easily distinguishable for any type of audience.