cassette – SØVN

Giulia Francavilla is a composer, researcher, performer, and sound designer from Turin (Italy), known under the moniker of Giulia Rae, and she specialized at the Hague Sonology Institute (Netherlands), where she currently works as associate researcher. The talented musician, however, never despised other fields of work not actually academic, first in the punk scene and noise-rock and then with the sets of algorithmic music in several clubs in the whole Europe, with publications on labels as Light Item, Ovaal, Intersezioni, Solium Records and Guerrilla Bizarre. Since 2021 the eclectic experimenter realized a series of acousmatic compositions for multichannel systems, Flow States, where she began to explore the 3D sound, research that brought her one year later to be an artist-in-residence at the Paris VIII University and at the iMAL Studios in Bruxelles. Nocturnal Drift shows instead in evidence the field recordings and the rarefied and evocative digital synth sounds, together with crackles, static, swashes, drones, granular patterns, and vibrational waves of multiple types and shapes. The whole set sometimes sounds cosmic, sidereal, with no rhythm elements, apart from barely noticeable pulsations, clicks and sparse beats in an extremely dilated and dreamy flow, the result of some electroacoustics stylistic features. Ambient atmospheres and noisy counterpoints: this is the formula of the three compositions here presented and published in a sophisticated tape, whose artwork was made by Lapo Sorride, another eclectic interdisciplinary artist. The first track is “Spinning Tree”, that immediately enchants with its hypnotic repetitions and wrinkled audio emissions, drones, and unstable melodies. “Canyon Blu” begins very brushy, but then immediately moves to suspended and nocturnal tones, with clicks and elements of chamber derivation. The title track is the “biggest” of the selection, since its length (13 and a half minutes), and it’s the most emotional and calibrated, thanks to choral passages masterfully cuts with punctiform auditory emissions, but also with denser vibrational events, mindful of explored places, where night entities reveal their presence and where the stars show their abstract plots crossing each other in barely whispered narratives. The whole duration is just a bit more than twenty-five minutes, but it’s enough to get fully immersed into sophisticated atmospheres, a great thing SØVN did to publish this work, although the unusual format and duration.

 

Giulia Rae – Nocturnal Drift