Martina Betti's ambient forms: Shedir.

Shedir. I spent some time trying to figure out who Shedir is. I looked for it in "One Thousand and One Nights" in vain, then in the books of Borges and Cortazar, but nothing. It was not in the books, but in the celestial vault: Shedir also known as Shedar, the brightest star in the constellation Cassiopeia. Its proper name derives from the Arabic صدر, şadr, which means bust. It derives from the fact that it is placed right in the heart of this mythological figure, usually represented as sitting with a mirror in his hand, intent on combing his hair.

In reality Shedir is a pseudonym, behind which the Italian Martina Betti hides. Martina is an electronic composer of Sardinian origin active since 2017, the year of publication of her debut work on Cyclic Law "Falling Time":

which was followed by this excellent CD “FiniteInfinity”, again on Cyclic Law:

and the brand new “Before the Last Light is Blown”, produced in 2023 by Californian n5MD:

What drew my attention to her was the article published in the September issue of the Italian music magazine Rockerilla, written by Mirco Salvadori:

and a photo of her, holding the electric guitar

and I found myself faced with an ecstatic form of ambient, with almost epic boundaries. A music very different from that of a nostalgic and hauntological format which, thanks to Mark Fisher, has long since decided to get lost in the meanders of promised but never realized forms of the future.

In his preface to the book “The Ambient Century” (Mark Prendergast, 2000), Briano Eno made an interesting digression by questioning how, according to the perspective dictated by classical music, the main musical revolutions have been described as changes in the way in which composers they put notes, chords and instruments together. A vision of musical history so centered on composition left out many other types of musical evolution, neglecting, in particular, the social and technological dimension on which music moves. A very strong movement in the late 19th and 20th centuries concerned music as an immersive and environmental experience, a theme well analyzed by David Toop. This can be heard in Mahler, Debussy, Satie, Varese and then in Cage, La Monte Young and the Modernists. In this narrative the music moves from the performative event to the sound space. A narrative influenced by factors such as recording and electronics, which allowed composers to work with impossible perspectives and relationships. Shedir's music reminds us how, thanks to technologies within everyone's reach, tiny sounds can be made enormous, and enormous ones compacted, and, using echoes and reverberations, those sounds can seem to be placed in a completely imaginary virtual space. In Shedir's music, in her ambient forms, the act of making music becomes the art of creating new sound places and creating new timbres, new instruments: the most basic materials of musical experience. Martina Betti builds a sophisticated sound geography, in which the listener becomes the population of a soundscape and is free to wander within it, in liberating digressions. Shedir's music is not distressing or dark, but radiates an epic serenity, enveloping the listener, elevating him/her towards surface tension where the music itself dissolves, revealing its tenuous immaterial nature. Let yourself be carried away.