Luigi Archetti: experimental music – visual art.
So declares his website. On its homepage a speaker cone
rendered in a perfect Michael Craig-Martin, perspectival
line drawing floats back and forth. Its gentle pace
and almost gnomic clarity make it a fine visual accompaniment
for the first of the 14 tracks on Februar.
Track 01 (its successors are just as anonymously titled)
wavers gently and quite beautifully in my headphones.
It turns out that the website and the music marry all
too well – on pausing the CD I realise that its
been blending perfectly with music streamed from the
artist’s website. Sigh. I somewhat sheepishly
close the browser window and begin again. The music
sounds momentarily thinner, but quickly appears to fill
out again. There’s a fair amount of subtle activity,
enough to maintain the attention. A stringed instrument,
perhaps a bass or cello fills the lower reaches while
tones waft across the middle and upper registers like
clouds. There’s a sense of the pendant and the
pensive mixed together. Track 3 is stippled with high-pitched
notes like sleet piercing snow in rods. Track 4 is lost
like waking alone from a strange dream in an unknown
house. Februar establishes itself in the quiet
room I’m sitting in. It’s dark and the hour
is late. Next morning it’s my soundtrack to the
morning journey to work, but the mixing of ambient sounds
with Archetti’s carefully composed pieces proves
unsuccessful. Given the space, somewhere uninterrupted
and already quiet, Februar is a haunting work.
Colin Buttimer
4/5 |
