09/12/2019

h.18.30 Electronic music, the turning point of the Eighties (free admission lesson with Alfonso Alberti)
h.21 Concert, Auditorium San Fedele

Acousmatic Space II

Simon Scott
Live

San Fedele Young Composer Prize
Miniature Estrose

Sound engineer: Filippo Berbenni

Debut in San Fedele by Simon Scott, better known as the historic drummer of Slowdive, British shoegaze legend of the 90s. Thanks to the contact with artists close to the world of ambient / electronic music such as Brian Eno and Machinefabriek, in 2009 he began a new path within which Scott studies and elaborates the “noise” element in all its musicality through the use of the guitar and electronics. Without denying his interest in distorted sound close to post-rock imagery, Simon Scott thus renews his interest in his musical past by creating vast sound spaces that characterize the new compositions: the distortion remains the intuition from which develops an intriguing play of timbral chiaroscuro in which the search for a melody remains capable of giving light to a music that appears dark and gloomy, but instead rich in nuances and intense emotional contrasts.
On the border between ambient and modern classical, his solo production has resulted in albums released on prestigious labels such as Touch, 12k and Miasmah. It is from 2019 Soundings, a dreamy sonic journey embroidered around field recordings collected in every part of the world during the tours with the band. The artist returns to Italy as a soloist after almost a decade – in 2010 he performed on two occasions for the Node Festival, both as a duo with Claudio Sinatti (Milan, Fondazione A. Pomodoro) and solo (Modena, Galleria Civica).

The finalists of the San Fedele 2019 Composer Prize presented their works on the first halv of the concert. The young composers faced the concise form of the miniature, the evocation of a microcosm of sound in a few minutes. The eight acousmatic pieces will follow each other in a suite entitled Miniature Estrose, eight timbral-coloristic nuances each characterized by a singular formal structure. Inconclusive dialogue by Alberto Gatti involves two asymmetrical sound environments that try to dialogue, one granular and point-like, the other envisages a rhythmic group of sounds that follow one another. Leonardo Bonetti resumes, in Bechstein repercussive, cluster recordings, using the old family piano, with the aim of exploiting the richness of the piano’s harmonic spectrum as the only source to give life to a musical landscape inhabited by sounds that explore the tonal possibilities. / melodics of the instrument. Furthermore, there is also the intention to investigate the percussive peculiarities of the piano. In a completely different direction he leads us on the Appropriation of the Memory of Geronimo Cappelli. The material he has chosen recalls the 90s, not too distant, immediately recognizable, regardless of whether or not it belongs to the listener’s own memory. Mattia Loris Siboni leads to the acousmatic theater with Now Hush and Look Around creates a miniature on the necessary theme of silence. Prelude to a continuously developing musical research, a research that does not see silence as a simple absence of sound but as an organic, omnipresent and fundamental element in music. How many types of silence are there? What are their functions within electroacoustic music or music in general? How does silence permeate between the poetic and poetic level of the work? Almost in response to these questions, Streams by Domiziano Maselli is inserted in a path with an archaic modal trend, of intense lyricism. Nicola Zolin instead uses elements coming from samples extracted from videogames and anime, combined with sections of industrial noise and digital synths. An essential component of the work are the vocal sections, used both within the sampler and as separate dialogues. The concept behind the project is focused on the concept of “relationship”. Walk # 3 by Massimo Colombo follows, three “sound postcards” of one minute each linked to a mountain walk. The sound material used comes from onsite field recordings. The duo Remo de Vico & Mariagaia Di Tommaso conclude the miniatures with the Disenchantment of Professor Aronnax for clarinet, magnetic tape and digital processes, in litany form, in which the simple monody prevails, almost extracted from a seventeenth-century fugato. Evocative piece, a sort of slow funeral procession.