Neuguitars 2024 #11: Intimate geographies in space and time: “Ten rooms under the sea” by Open to the sea, Dissipatio Label, 2024
A semiotic gem capable of both setting the mind in fibrillation, unleashing a myriad of cultural connections, and inspiring listening full of emotional references and aesthetic gratifications.
Ten Rooms Under the Sea | Open to the Sea | DISSIPATIO (bandcamp.com)
I start this review by saying 'mea culpa'. I hadn't taken this “Ten rooms under the sea” into consideration and I am grateful to the people at Dissipatio Label for kindly sending me a copy. This album is impressive, a semiotic gem capable of both setting the mind in fibrillation, unleashing a myriad of cultural connections, and inspiring listening full of emotional references and aesthetic gratifications. Kinesthetic music that shows us how for artists, today, cinema can exist outside of cinema as a historical space, or as a mnemonic history essentially linked to musical technology.
The definition of the album's tracks as rooms expresses and reiterates the spatial conception of its sound. The explicit reiteration of this concept is even more evident in the graphics inside the CD packaging where each room track finds its own precise planimetric position, almost of an architectural type. Sound is space, space is architecture, architecture is intimacy, and intimacy is our life after covid. If during covid we lived in confined spaces, now this album highlights a large extended reverberant sound that smells of large public spaces.
A condominium, a hotel, a public space under the sea far from the banal everyday life and the surrogates of reality that we are now experiencing. “Ten rooms under the sea” offers the listener an imaginative trajectory that allows them to cross these spaces liminally, where the production of mental images is combined with listening to the music. A cumulative and random assemblage enlivened by emotional trajectories.
Ten Rooms will not tell the future, but explicitly narrates a present that is already the future in itself. This album tells of the desire for a new narrative after Covid, for something more reassuring, immersive and less fragmentary. It is the large, dark sound that strikes on a subliminal level, making us perceive new possibilities, new hopes. The desire for greater stability, less fragmentation, a more extensive and organic vision. Enrico Coniglio, Saverio Rosi and Matteo Uggeri sign a small precious masterpiece made of music placed on the border between ambient and sound art. Here the guitars completely lose their popular semantic value to veer towards new spaces and dimensions, where their sound marries with electronics to become something else. It is a new genetic hybridization that combines the art of memory, architectural imagination, museum visits, interior landscapes. Dissipatio Label becomes the record label to follow during 2024. Sincere congratulations.
