2CD – Gruenrekorder

This is a two-CD release, the first features twenty-one tracks from sound artist and multi-instrumentalist Sergio Armaroli who is active in the free form and experimental scene, the second contains thirty songs from Steve Piccolo. Two distinct yet contiguous paths, creating a dialogue between different generations: Armaroli, born in 1972, a vibraphonist and improviser, and Piccolo, born in 1954, a new wave artist of the 1980s alongside John Lurie and Arto Lindsay, who then moved to Milan, where he developed a deep understanding of the Italian avant-garde scene. This encounter takes place on the common ground of sound research that privileges collage and fragments, with an extensive use of spoken word, sampled materials, theatrical elements and electroacoustic experiments. The result is a complex construction, two radio dramas created in 2016 that are barely recognisable as such. Sound journeys where text and voice, translated in several languages, assume the same weight as environmental noises and electronic musing, composing landscapes that refer to the traditions of radio art and sound poetry. In this sense, the operation places itself consciously in a line that looks back to the two authors’ pre-digital past, when listening and broadcasting were still intense experiences, far removed from the current hyper-ubiquity of the web. Piccolo notes that ‘we live in an era in which the creator’s capacity for action rapidly loses importance, while that of the user or consumer, the listener, the recipient, gains importance’, and underlines how our present is marked by ‘critical mass, hyper-ubiquity, excess, overkill, economy, and ecology’. It is not only a generational diagnosis, but an aesthetic positioning: the desire to restore to fruition an active, critical character, able to find meaning in a flow of heterogeneous materials. In this context, the tracks offered by Armaroli Piccolo do not seem contradictory, but complementary: one closer to an idea of an ​​abstract score, the other more oriented to a verbal writing that becomes music. Listening to the two CDs, one picks up a constant tension between immediacy and opacity, between the desire to communicate and the will to maintain zones of indecipherability. The voices do not tell linear stories, but open up glimpses, alluding to broader discourses, leaving the listener the task of connecting the fragments. This is, perhaps, the substance of the two works: not so much a one-size-fits-all message, as a practice of listening that demands active participation, a traversal of sounds and words that finds meaning in its fragmentation.

 

Sergio Armaroli & Steve Piccolo – Listen! MadeRadioArt Anthology