GLEAM
Luigi Ceccarelli – Gianni Trovalusci
electroacoustic instant composition
GLEAM part I 12:52
GLEAM part II. 4:14
GLEAM part III. 8:41
GLEAM part IV. 2:46
GLEAM part V. 10:26
GLEAM part VI 5:49
works by Luigi Ceccarelli and Gianni Trovalusci
Gianni Trovalusci flutes and sonic tube
Luigi Ceccarelli – live electroincs
edited by Folderol
produced by Marco Contini for Kappabit 2023
Published by Folderol* – www.folderol.it
all musics by Luigi Ceccarelli and Gianni Trovalusci
Digital Album, Streaming + Download
listen and purchase the Digital Album from Bandcamp
Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads in MP3, FLAC and more.
recorded in Cagli, at the Teatro Comunale, by GLEAM from 8 to 10 March 2022
mixed and mastered in Rome, at Edison Studio by Luigi Ceccarelli
Original cover art: “La clarté I” (2018-19) by Giulia Napoleone
Courtesy Galleria Il Ponte, Florence
Thanks to Sandro Pascucci, director of the Teatro Comunale di Cagli
(*) Folderol is a branch of Kappabit Music Division
℗ © 2023 by Kappabit S.r.l. (SIAE) – All rights reserved
ALBUM REVIEWS
Il Manifesto – 19/07/2023, by Mario Gamba
https://ilmanifesto.it/tutta-lebbrezza-del-suono
VISIONI – NOTE SPARSE
All the exhilaration of the sound
Vitalism. Exhilaration of sound in all its appearances, classic and “delirious” (see Deleuze/Guattari), connected to a consequentiality and unanchored from any connection or landing. Fun to the point of hedonism. Thoughts from both (Luigi Ceccarelli on live electronics, Gianni Trovalusci on flutes and pipes) at the highest level of vividness and depth. Sequences imbued with enjoyment with the pleasure of hermetically singable phrasing and seismic explosions. Suggestive changes in sound climate: there is room for sweet dawns and terrifying hurricanes. Fusion of acoustic and synthetic sounds rather than a search for distinction between the two sources of sound. Influence of jazz-derived free music? Yes, and it is one more opportunity exploited with acumen and enthusiasm by these two performers who trained in conservatories to destroy the poisonous teachings of the academy and revitalize technical/formal knowledge as far as possible. Rarefaction and material density alternate with souplesse. Delight!
Blow up, Nazim Comunale, numero di Ottobre 2023
https://www.blowupmagazine.com/
Luigi Ceccarelli, member of Edison Studio, teacher of electronic music, eclectic composer, capable of giving voice and breath to machines, making them truly human, meets in this album the flutes and sound tubes of Gianni Trovalusci: the result is a prodigy that is difficult to say . Six movements where freedom and creativity reign; a conversation without even a comma or a syllable too many, where everything sounds in the right place. If the labyrinths of the first movement can certainly recall Evan Parker with the Electroacoustic Ensemble, he very soon takes the path of the unknown high sea and an ocean of sound where a thousand different stimuli converge and suggestions of all kinds appear and disappear as if on a journey initiatory. Try to imagine Autechre and Roscoe Mitchel in a jam. You won’t be close to it anyway. Or let’s send it into space, to bear witness to the past, present and future voice of humanity. It could be the right time that other life forms finally answer us. Place guaranteed the playlist. [8.5]
The New Noise – 13/07/2023, Tony de Martino
https://www.thenewnoise.it/gleam-gleam/
GLEAM, Gleam
Electroacoustic Instant Composition: Gianni Trovalusci (flutes, sound tubes) and Luigi Ceccarelli (live electronics) are the masters of ceremony of 55 extraordinary minutes of music and sounds: controlled, perfect improvisation, gleams like beams of light in the Hi-Fi space.
55 minutes divided into six movements extracted from approximately ten hours of recordings made in the nineteenth-century Teatro Comunale of Cagli (Pesaro/Urbino) between 8 and 10 March 2022. We know that that March was very cold and the large, empty theatre, was still cold more, but the sessions had been planned for some time, so let’s imagine Trovalusci and Ceccarelli with the enthusiasm of nerds 4.0, with wool gloves and black tights under their jeans blowing into the 2 meter long metal flutes-pipes, calculating the times and programs to be used on the laptops, without forgetting the frozen baroque flutes to be heated (how do they warm up? By playing and rehearsing twice as long as normally necessary?) and the repeated soundchecks, the deadly draft that enters from the old creaking wooden door, the Looming proscenium, the spatial arrangement of the speakers.
il Manifesto – 22/07/2023, Alias – “Ostinato” di Mario Gamba
https://ilmanifesto.it/luigi-ceccarelli-invenzioni-di-un-altro-mondo
Luigi Ceccarelli, inventions from another world
Why improvisation? «It’s nothing new, in a certain sense it has always been my choice of way of producing music».
But you also have a recent past as an author of written scores. «Yes, but the writing always came after I had processed sounds through electronics, with the use of the technologies available at a given moment. If a musician, me in this case, works with electronics it means that he works directly on the sound. So he is very close to improvisation. This is not the case if a musician works starting from the staff. In my history, composition and improvisation are very close, I would almost say they are identical.”
Luigi Ceccarelli has just published Gleam (Folderol) in tandem with Gianni Trovalusci. The result of three days of pure improvisation sessions. Then all the material was selected and six parts of a work were obtained which only after cuts and connections at the table became a composition. Obviously he’s on live electronics. Trovalusci is a flautist who has always been interested in non-canonical contemporary music. He uses all kinds of flutes and various kinds of pipes. These pipes are now designated, thanks to Trovalusci’s performances, as real musical instruments.
After all, this happens with the most disparate objects in the improvisational practices (and also in writing with the pentagram) of music that is said to be experimental and which sometimes really is according to the Deleuzian spirit.
Pure improvisation? Not even a plan, not even a prior agreement on some aspect of the musical adventure you are undertaking? Just as Franco Evangelisti wanted when he founded the Nuova Consonanza Improvisation Group in the mid-1960s?
“Exactly. The pattern, a pattern, if we want to call it that, emerges then and there. Structures are constantly changing as you play and record. In certain passages, modalities are established, it is discovered that structures that work have been encountered, and these are always modalities of interaction. But there is nothing predefined, Trovalusci and I don’t even know how long a recording session lasts.”
Ceccarelli does not improvise sound journeys, melodies/harmonies/rhythms for unreleased musical fragments: Trovalusci does this. The improviser/composer on the machines takes what the flautist plays, transforms it, puts it back into circulation. «You can say that Gleam is made entirely with a single sound nucleus that becomes many other things», says Ceccarelli. What do you find when listening? Inventions from another world, artificial and incredibly natural.
Well, all this work prior to measurement and measurements, all this commitment that precedes the finished work is there and can be perceived in the final result: sparkling music, continuous feedback internal to compositions in progress, loud sounds or sometimes almost imperceptible, the interaction between the two is crazy and sapient. The sounds, after recording at the theatre, traveled from Cagli to Ceccarelli’s famous Edison studios in Rome for mixing. Trovalusci also joined him to study “all” the material again. Magnificently sonic, poetic and here the strict definition “Electroacoustic Instant Composition” jumps out at me a bit, because GLEAM is emotion in its pure state, incandescent awareness of the possibilities of sound and – why not? – romantic modern music, finally available on CD published by Marco Contini’s Roman Folderol Records.
Let us therefore insert, with an ancient gesture, this silver disk into the audio player: frriiimmm bbrriinn friaan, part “GLEAM Part 1” – dilated sound fragments. Buuum “GLEAM Part 2” – aliens at the gates. “GLEAM Part 3”: vibrating metal plates, flutes that flee forward, then resound, a storm of sounds rises in the distance (the spatiality rendered at the highest level in the empty theater is very evident) and away a monsoon rain pours out which envelops the listener surprised and without shelter. “GLEAM Part 4”… fear. We return to earth with “GLEAM Part 5”: screams, sizzles then numerous crazy metallic butterflies dance in front of our closed eyes, unforgettable like our best nightmare. “GLEAM Part 6” closes and is pacification, universal sharing: the flute, a wise echo of the primordial sound, immerses us in a kaleidoscopic stellar firmament, floating astronauts on parade concentrated on the void it fills.
Quoting Claudio Rocchi, an artist dear to me, “this music is not made to be listened to but to be listened to within us”. The extra contents that can be reached via the QR code inside the beautiful cover designed by the artist Giulia Napoleone are interesting. Finally, please, raise your hand if you have listened to music you care about at least once and haven’t made a comparison between files, vinyl and CDs (I did it with Matmos and recently with Ambarchi’s Shebang): here there is clearly no comparison and since GLEAM is in all respects a sound object that deserves and demands attention, listening to it on compact disc is an unforgettable acoustic experience, because we too will appear there, in that theatre, in the stalls, in the dark, absorbed, defenseless… and says, but what about the cold? We won’t feel the cold!