Neuguitars 2024 #6: The preparatory drawings by Alessandra Novaga and Kid Millions
On Sinopia, we hear Colpitts and Novaga finding new territories, and creating career defining music together.
Alessandra Novaga is a Milan based guitarist. For years she has been exploring the possible territories in which her instrument can lead her. She has crossed the classical territories, in which she trained, graduating from the Musik Akademie in Basel, until reaching impalpable abstractions without placing limits on one or the other. The sound, the meanings, the encounters and the narratives are the elements that guide her. In addition to her solo projects, her collaborations currently see her often playing with Stefano Pilia, and with the trio of which she is co-founder, What We do When in Silence, together with Nicola Ratti and Enrico Malatesta. In recent years she has collaborated with Loren Connors, Elliot Sharp, Adrian Utley, Sandro Mussida, Kid Millions, Object Collection, Patrizia Oliva, Elena Kakaliagou. Her music was published on Die Schachtel, Blume, Setola di Maiale, Coherent States, Long Song among the others.
Alessandra Novaga, Kid Millions – Sinopia (LP) – Soundohm
SINOPIA | Alessandra Novaga & Kid Millions | Long Song Records (bandcamp.com)
I think I can reasonably say that I know Alessandra Novaga quite well. Enough to say that she has a complex personality and a huge artistic desire. When she chooses a project, a new project, she dedicates herself to it with a rare passion and stubbornness: Alessandra achieves an almost theatrical intensity in reaching out and identifying with the personalities and stylistic concepts of who or what she has decided to deal with. It had already been like this on the occasion of the excellent work on Fassbinder and his "Wunderkammer", released in 2017
this was the case again for the album “I Should Have Been a Gardener” dedicated to Derek Jarman and produced by the excellent Italian label Die Schachtel in 2020.
After the Covid years have passed, Novaga returns with a new work signed together with Kid Million (aka John Colpitts of Oneida, Man Forever and many other projects) entitled "Sinopia", produced by the Italian Long Song Records in 2023.
Since I didn't know the term 'sinopia', I did some research on the subject, discovering that 'sinopia' is a preparatory drawing used for fresco painting and mosaic. It was carried out with red earth (originally coming from Sinope, on the Black Sea) on the wall where the final work was located. Once this phase was completed, the design was progressively covered with the last layer of plaster. So, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, these great preparatory drawings were born and many art historians use now them to study the genesis of the works, as on these drawings they can observe second thoughts or lines added later by the author during the creation of the pictorial work..
I believe that Alessandra Novaga and John Colpitts chose this technical term as the title of their album, in order to exploit its metaphorical potential. In a certain sense, the sinopias, like the photographs, show us a way to grasp a totality, a more complete and complex vision that remains hidden in the fragments and spaces that surround and connect them. In this case it becomes necessary to talk about style using metaphors, using the sinopies as metaphors themselves. But metaphors can become cumbersome: our era has moved from the museum-like accumulation of memories in books, recordings, collections and archaeological and architectural remains, to a constant flow of energies, images, lost narratives, repetitions and memes that make the post- modernism obsolete like a dinosaur in the mammals' age. Yet, even in this very dynamic and fluid era there is a need to "download" these memories so that we can return to an original source of strength and dynamics.
Choosing to play six sinopies, they decided to stop their music at a level of uncertain imperfection, choosing to record performances upon which the other completed the final design. The album moves through sections of newfound sounds, stillness, chaos and frenetic energy, which combine to capture two virtuosos meeting on record for the first time. Music, like poetry, which is not just a play of ideas and images, but also has its rhythmic and melodic values, is articulated over time and its power certainly lies here: it allows a detachment, induces meditation, mediation.
An artistic path that we also find in the cover of the LP, the work of Dan Schechter, an award-winning designer who worked for 20 years on the covers of Colpitts' albums, and who interpreted the concept of sinopia stratification for the cover. “Sinopia” is an excellent work of research, a complex but fully satisfying work that leaves space for the listener to outline and compose her/his own final sinopic vision, exactly as the two authors have masterfully done.
I suggest you listen to other interesting things by Alessandra Novaga:
Spiralis Aurea Trio by Stefano Pilia, Alessandra Novaga, Adrian Utley
Glimpses of a Day by Alessandra Novaga & Stefano Pilia
Movimenti Lunari by Alessandra Novaga
This week Neuguitars also suggests:
DRONES, SONGS AND FAIRY DUST by Robert Poss
Drones, Songs and Fairy Dust is the latest release from pioneering avant-guitarist Robert Poss, a founding member of the acclaimed wall-of-guitars group Band Of Susans. The album was performed, recorded and mixed by Poss at Trace Elements Records in New York and Chestnut Hill.
Inside the Outside...Experimentations in American Primitive Guitar by Various Artists
Inside the Outside: is a collection of tracks by a group of artists from all corners of the globe influenced, inspired and playing acoustic, fingerpicking guitar in the Fahey/Basho, American Primitive guitar idiom.
Luminous Mind (Four for Naropa) by Thurston Moore
Four seven minutes pieces for Naropa (1016-1100) great Indian mahasiddha and master of mahahudra and tantra. He received the mahamudra and tantra lineage teachings from his guru Tilopa and transmitted them to his disciple, Marpa, the Great Translator of Tibet. Teach Peace in 2024!
Mike Cooper / Scot Ray play Kika Kila by Mike Cooper and Scot Ray
KIKA KILA is the Hawaiian name for lap steel guitar a guitar innovation invented at the end of the 19th Century by a Hawaiian school boy named Joseph Kekuku. He revolutionised the guitar and prepared it to take over 20th Century music world wide.