14/03/2022

h.21 Auditorium San Fedele

Fennesz / Quinn
Glares of Infinity

Shackleton
Live set

Known in the early 2000s for his production in the Dubstep galaxy, British composer Sam Shackleton subsequently traced his own path through the use of complex percussive layers with rhythmic patterns from Africa, the Middle East, India, the Caribbean and the Southeast Asia. Over the past ten years, he has continued to design his unique sound world with great personality, straddling the electronic and experimental spheres. The plot of his live set in San Fedele took up ideas and fragments from his latest LP, Departing Like Rivers, but as a watermark, the performance was in fact set during the rehearsal day with the acousmonium that preceded the concert on March 14th. In the record, as the author indicates, an early morning atmosphere prevails after a night of partying. It is an engaging listening, tinged with Shackleton’s typical percussion and recurring vocal pieces that evoke the spirit of traditional English folk.Despite the somewhat subdued nature of the record, Shackleton sees it as an extension of his sound and concludes: 

“With my music, I am trying to reach the level of the unconscious, something that touches a little deeper than the Here and Now”.

The evening will be introduced by the acousmatic diffusion of an audiovisual work in four parts, Glares of Infinity, commissioned by San Fedele Musica to the Austrian musician Christian Fennesz with the participation of the video artist Andrew Quinn. At the center of the project there was the request to the Viennese artist to search in his musical archives four unpublished fragments, a sort of antecedent, of precompositive raw material, of a sound palette, but at the same time four representative tracks of the great expressive themes that characterize his language: the saturating ambient clusters, the alternating harmonic and inharmonic sound bands, the pedal sounds, the continuum and the obstinate rhythmic, the brief solo hints of electric guitar evoking a nostalgic world and finally the resplendent brightness of the symphonic ambient, in relation to the title of the suite: Flashes of infinity, referring to the celestial Jerusalem of the book of Revelation.