Tempo Reale Festival 2021, ARIA
Exploratory sounds and music
ARIA
June, 21st > 23rd
Florence, Villa Strozzi Terrace
ARIA is not just the title of an enigmatic John Cage composition. Instead, it most of all wishes to be a symbolic gesture that alludes to a feeling of reopening to the making of live music. We will accomplish this by organising an open-air programme in a little-known part of the park of Villa Strozzi, with the collaboration of a core team of Italian and international musicians, who have all responded enthusiastically to our tireless desire to offer exploratory music. Once again, we will therefore enjoy a rainbow of different approaches and of different instruments and languages, united by the spirit of exploration that has always been the distinctive mark of our activity.
Program:
21 June, 20.30hrs
ARIA #1
> Michele Rabbia
Michele Rabbia is a percussionist and drummer. The main characterising qualities in his music are sound, gesture, action, and also silence. Performing solo or with a group, he expresses himself by shaping sound spaces where he combines technology with the originality of handcrafted materials which he personally chooses with care. He plays in various musical contexts: improvised, contemporary, and electronic music. His live and recorded activity includes collaborations with a myriad of different musicians, but also with renowned choreographers, directors, and writers. He has performed in the most important festivals in Europe, China, India, United States.
Dokumenta sonum is a “container project” where images, small sound installations, gestures, and musical actions unfold over sound textures. Sound, the main element of his work, is here used by Michele Rabbia as a fabric where interventions can be created aiming towards a continuous transformation, creating colours and shades, while noise is treated as part of the musical sound, matched with the silences giving life to narrative structures. Percussion and electronics are the expressive “vehicles” that drive this project along the paths of research and experimentation.
> Julien Desprez
Julien Desprez is a musician and performer based in Paris. Jazz and rock were his first musical loves but, as his experience increased, his approach to his instrument, to music, and to space also changed. He now considers the guitar more like a drum set, an organ, an instrument that can be modified at will. Evolving between sound art, performance, and contemporary improvised music, his work focuses on all the questions that arise from a stage space, using the body, space, vision, and light, but with sound remaining as the central pillar.
Agora guides you through an electric jungle with unfathomable dynamics, where the air is dry and humid, and the trees are a little bit too green and burn from within. While “agora” means the meeting of the entire population and the public space for meeting, “agora” also means “now” in Portuguese. Agora plays with situations with double meanings, hides the guitar behind the feet, and moves like an acrobat with high impedance. Agora was created as a recording studio track during one of the lockdowns of 2020. Agora is also a piece for electronics, impedance, electric guitar, and podorhythmics.
22 June, 20.30hrs
ARIA #2
> Vincenzo Scorza
Vincenzo Scorza is a sound sculptor, working on the edges of research, between music and technology. He stresses the limits between matter and form, between improvisation and structure. Attracted by glitch, ambient, and drone sounds, he establishes each of his creative manifestations within the ever-changing flow of the live performance dimension. A graduate in Electronic Music at the Conservatory of Bologna and in DAMS Music at Bologna University, he actively collaborates with leading artists and theatre companies of the contemporary scene, including Ateliersi, with which he was a finalist of the Ubu Award 2018 for best sound project / original music for the show In Your Face. He has had many appearances in festivals and national and international situations.
Lorem Ipsum
Postponing to a later moment, maybe more complete and maybe not, an empty space to be filled out, metaphor of filling a space, without urgency, a possibility, available space, that is not absence but rather container (recipĕre, that which receives, welcomes, contains), reclaiming of a metasyntactic place of thought. Lorem Ipsum is a poem of freedom.
An exploration of microsound, conducted through a modular system that dialogues and interacts with a generative algorithmic framework that conditions its organisational aspects on a formal level. The electronic device’s ability to generate sound structures is supported by the performer, in continuous feedback between the artist’s creativity and a form of machine self-awareness. The artist no longer performs with sound, but with behaviours. The machine ceases to be a lifeless outside body and instead finds itself projected next to the performer, effectively generating a duo, in a game of availability where one part draws a shape, and the other colours it in.
> Dario Fariello
Dario Fariello is a multi-instrumentalist and improviser. Born in Naples in 1987, he plays saxophones, viola, samplers, and modular synthesizers. He has studied piano, guitar, and saxophone with Annamaria Iorizzo, Giacinto Piracci, Guglielmo Pagnozzi, Edoardo Marraffa, Harri Sjöström. He graduated at DAMS Bologna, where he co-founded the Bologna Improvisers Orchestra, the Eclectic Polpo Records label, and the Musica Imprevedibile radio show, which then became a regular concert series in Bologna and a three-day festival in Naples. Upon moving to Berlin in 2010 to collaborate with Tristan Honsinger and Eren Ileri, he co-founded Multiversal: a series of concerts and small festivals which later became a travelling festival throughout Europe, involving a wide network of noise and improvised music performers.
Creative and destructive music
Using instant composition, I put together collages of sounds performed live using saxophones, strings, samples, and modular synthesizers.
Ingredients: A tonal palette enriched with ambiguity, using microtones for a respective multitone experience; rhythm is intended as a collage of tempos that are constantly renegotiated, enjoying a (real or apparent) simultaneity of planes, through multiple sounds and sudden changes in speed; the music is built on melodic associations/intuitions, searching for connections that link heterogeneous elements and co-opting noise and concrete sounds for the melodic cause. The timbre also wants to be ambiguous and relative: I choose a sober but raw saxophone sound, “soiled with harmonics” through the use of voice. To me, silence is a timbre. As such, it is used without hesitation to create, destroy, and transform materials and meanings by immersing them in time.
> ZUMTRIO
Francesco Canavese, electric guitar
Francesco Giomi, radio and synths
Stefano Rapicavoli, drums
A project divided between structure and improvisation, a strongly “electric” nature, open to many different languages and methods of interaction, with an expressive diversity with almost no borders: these are the fundamental elements of an experience that originated within Tempo Reale, exploring a free and enjoyable idea of hospitality. Three musicians with strong links to Tempo Reale and with musical roots that go back to the early experimental music avantgarde as well as to exploratory jazz, generating unexpected and surprising sonic, electronic, and emotional landscapes. Zumtrio has recently been presented in Florence, Pisa, Rome, Turin, Milan, Mantua, and Latina.
23 June, 20.30 hrs
ARIA #3
> Anthony Pateras
Anthony Pateras is a composer, pianist, and electronic musician active from the late 90s. He has written extensively for percussion, his solos Hypnagogics and Mutant Theatre are now widely performed, and his ensemble works have been commissioned and premiered by Synergy, Speak Percussion, and Percussion Group The Hague. His musical research investigates the nexuses between composition, improvisation, and electronic music. For ARIA he is presenting his latest work, Nonsite Satellite (2021) and The traces of a mistake, the most simple one possible the reactions of even younger children (2017), composed with Rohan Drape.
> Lea Bertucci
Lea Bertucci is a composer, performer and sound designer whose work describes relationships between acoustic phenomena and biological resonance. In addition to her performance practice with woodwind instruments, her work incorporates multi-channel speaker arrays, electroacoustic feedback, extended instrumental technique and tape collage. In recent years, her projects have expanded toward site-responsive and site-specific sonic investigations of architecture. Deeply experimental, her work is unafraid to subvert musical expectation.
An event within Secret Florence, a strategic project of Estate Fiorentina 2021
Partners: Regione Toscana, Città Metropolitana di Firenze, Comune di Firenze, Estate Fiorentina, Ministero della Cultura, Fondazione Cassa di Risparmio Firenze, Publiacqua, Quartiere 4, Arci Firenze, musicaelettronica.it
