CD + Booklet – Consumer Waste

Published by the English label “Consumer Waste”, the latest release from Ravenna-based Giovanni Lami, a sound artist and musician confortable with soundscapes and concepts from sound-ecology, immediately surprises us for its exploration of magnetic tape’s timbral potentials. With the tape recorder being the artist’s medium of choice for several decades the release draws us into a vintage avant-garde. Giovanni Lami begins with three magnetic tapes buried in three different sites in Austria, Greece and Italy. From these scraps, adapted and played on different tape recorders (mainly Nagra IV-SJs) he reconstructs a crackling, hushed and spurious narrative. The slushy ground has degraded the ferromagnetic material and the plastic casing of the tape, although we don’t know exactly – even by consulting the attached booklet – whether the author has assembled many recordings or whether he manipulated those finds in a way that is respectfully “autochthonous”, elaborating precise edits of tapes that come only from a specific dig. The sixteen pages of the risographed1 booklet instead show the stylised author’s shots, images that have accompanied the lapidary but hieratic texts by Francesco Bergamo. In each of his texts there are more words artfully deleted that we can no longer distinguish. Perhaps in this lies much of the poetry of the whole work, not only what is given to us to sense but what is no longer recognisable, the one that was lost, that is worn and debased. The true nature of all representations: “remains” that “are no longer human, animal, roots, plants, minerals,” the ruins of modernity and turned into a parallel dimension of sounds.

 

Giovanni Lami – Bias