Neuguitars 2024 #17 “Esercizi per esistere” by Elio Martuscello, Peter Bartlett and Nazim Comunale, Dissipatio, 2024
Another great record by the italian label Dissipatio
Contrary to what many people think, I am not a compulsive music listener. I don't use Spotify, I don't download mp3s, I still listen to music from a Hi Fi system in my studio. When I want to write about music, I go to my studio, put a CD in the player and let the music fill my ears, then I sit at the desk and write a text, full of all the ideas that the music itself has aroused in me. For almost forty years I have been using two old B&W DM 100 speakers and a Rotel RA 820 amplifier, an old-fashioned system, I admit, and now that I think about it, I think that music has had their timbre for me for forty years now. As a result, I can no longer imagine music, any music with a different sound: my ear has become accustomed to their particular vibration.
It's also true that I wouldn't know how else to listen to music like that of “Esercizi per esistere”", an album released in 2024, again for the Italian Dissipatio, an independent record label that, for some time, has colonized my sound spaces. “Esercizi per esistere” is, in fact, not just an album that focuses on synesthetic qualities, combining the music by Elio Martuscello, the drawings and collages by Peter Bartlett and the poems by Nazim Comunale. Listening to the music is, therefore, essential from reading and viewing the beautiful booklet that accompanies the CD, which does not limit itself to accompanying Martusciello's forms of sound art, but integrates them into a complex perceptive and sensorial journey.
It's true that much of this phenomenon has an involuntary nature, but I think listening to the sounds by Elio Martusciello, seeing the colors by Peter Bartlett, reading the words by Nazim Comunale can open the doors to much deeper personal reflections than those obtained from a simple listening via headphones, perhaps going to or returning from work on a crowded bus. I believe that “Esercizi per esistere” is a work that is mainly based on sensorial contamination and therefore requires a much more conscious and time-spanning approach, animated by a spirit of experimentation and innovation aimed at bringing the happy owner of one of the 200 CDs e booklets produced well outside his/her comfort zone. Certainly outside my bubble of listening predominantly based on guitars, guitars present here but whose sound has been transcended, transformed into something very different both from a musical and cultural point of view. An extended dystopian transposition aided by the alienating beautiful, confidential voice of Alexandra Staraşciuc. In short, “Esercizi per esistere” is truly a path of cultural, sensorial and perceptive exercises made to remind us that life and therefore also listening to music is a very different thing from what our society continues to push us on a daily basis.
It's true. I realize that there may be other, perhaps better, ways to listen to music, but I prefer to do it this way, in the tranquility of my studio. While I was writing these notes on “Esercizi per esistere” I realized that my vision of music is probably very similar to the particular sound emitted by my old and reliable stereo system. I think that it almost does not evolve and that my memory always returns, periodically to the same focal points, making my listening points on a map that gradually continues to widen, increasingly unaware, by now, of the temporal evolutions that our cultures and societies propose to us . A map that now also integrates these "exercises", which in turn are anchored to other coordinates showing other possible routes and derivations. I certainly haven't finished listening carefully yet.
