Fiori Notturni
Capiuz returns on Over My Body with a new club-ready album that slashes through a nocturnal forest landscape with fluorescents and violent bursts of color. Taking its name from a series of paintings called “Bande di Fiori Notturni” by Italian artist Alice Visentin, the project goes through a wide array of influences and bpms. Terra Nuda (naked earth) acts as an opener fusing a foggy drone with drum breaks and dance hall syncopations. Hectic follows up with a more bass oriented attitude incarnated in a heavy pounding kick pattern and driven by metallic drums with a restless spirit. The sounds and textures of Fiori Notturni are heavily inspired by the works of John Cage and his use of percussive instruments for both rhythmic and textural purposes. These influences become pretty clear in slower cuts like Black Needle and the title track, where jingles, rattles and other high-pitched instruments create a moving bed for the rhythmic section. Other works such as 0400 and the collaboration with label head B E N N, Lunar Eclipse, bring a faster pace to the project with a higher focus on rhythmic layering. Before giving its way to the Ancestral Vision remix, the “night” is closed off by Hallucinogen, a longer track driven by a steady kick that plays with different odd timed patterns to create an exciting and enveloping trip.
Newfound Intimacy
A new album by Italian producer Capiuz that deviates from his standard production towards a more personal and techno driven project. The title references the abundant use of found footage material all throughout the 8 tracks, videos are spotted, downloaded around the internet and used in the production process to create a voyeuristic and lo-fi feeling. Newfound intimacy is also a nod to the old wooden room in which the project has been composed. While the beatless works on this record move around emotional synths, going from distorted and detuned to aethereal and touchless, the dance tracks orient themselves towards the influences of micro-house and witch-house. The fragile and distant soundscapes of the ep are amplified through the use of field recordings, as in the title track which uses an unedited silent recording of the artist’s studio as a backdrop. The blissful and nostalgic sound weaves together foggy atmospheres with deep and rumbling kicks, Newfound Intimacy sounds like an old tape that is, at the same time, reflective and lively.
Sound Objects (devices)
Sound Objects is a double work that reimagines music production, comprehending a set of three percussive max for live instruments and a full album composed with them. The digital devices’ concept exceeds the traditional boundaries to create single instruments that can morph into a wider variety of percussive sounds. Departing from the ordinary concept of isolated instruments with fixed functions (such as kick, snare, and hi-hat) the three sound objects take the form of hybrid drums that fully take advantage of their digital capabilities, seamlessly blending the various roles. Splinter, Komet and Flubber have unique engines, merging FM synthesis, sampling, subtractive synthesis and audio effects. Their timbers, textures and fundamental frequencies change all across the 127 midi notes while maintaining a cohesive sound. Following the development of these three m4l devices, the album is a showcase of their capabilities and unique sonic palette.
Sound Objects (album)
Sound Objects is a double work that reimagines music production, comprehending a set of three percussive max for live instruments and a full album composed with them. The digital devices’ concept exceeds the traditional boundaries to create single instruments that can morph into a wider variety of percussive sounds. Departing from the ordinary concept of isolated instruments with fixed functions (such as kick, snare, and hi-hat) the three sound objects take the form of hybrid drums that fully take advantage of their digital capabilities, seamlessly blending the various roles. Splinter, Komet and Flubber have unique engines, merging FM synthesis, sampling, subtractive synthesis and audio effects. Their timbers, textures and fundamental frequencies change all across the 127 midi notes while maintaining a cohesive sound. Following the development of these three m4l devices, the album is a showcase of their capabilities and unique sonic palette.
The New Show
A relentless crave for something new lays as an emotional foundation for this work and has directed the attitude while making it towards a personal journey through repetition and legitimization. The core sound comes from a melange of mangled samples, drum breaks and deep kick lines, where rhythmic patterns are hammered down in an obsessive manner before being hastily truncated and re-worked into new entities. In a frantic research with no fixed objective, every track takes the form of a fast pace pursuit that keeps blindly deviating from its course and shattering its own boundaries.
SAAM
“Embrace your primal nature and let the frenzied beat lead you back to your ancestral roots”. Leese and Capiuz join forces for a new split EP on Over My Body. Along with two mutual remixes of previous recordings and a brand new track from the experimental oriented duo.
Hpeggiator
Hpeggiator is designed to expand the limits of a classic arpeggiator.
It doesn’t have a speed limit and it features three modes: normal, range and slow. The arpeggio direction can be modified. while the gate parameter adjusts the length of the outgoing notes. Hpeggiator features both increments by steps and in chord mode, it does feature a sequencer. The variable length anche can be randomize both manually and with the autodice function.
Demo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tp66ayUNcsE
Krynn
Krynn is a multiband stereo distortion developed by Luca Favaro (T.U.) based on a concept design by SY/IN. It is distributed by HIDE Productions | H-4.
Demo – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0t7v3gi_Dzo
Pleiades
A new percussive club work from Italian producer Capiuz, exploring a vast range of tempos while keeping a centre around rhythmic workouts and ethnic influences. The ep spaces from slow driving dubs to faster dance breaks, paying homage to composer Iannis Xenakis and his rhythmically obsessive approach to composition. Tracks like Bancal or Le Style rely on slow yet relentless bass kicks and hypnotic atmospheres, while other cuts, such as Tam Tam or Peaux, present themselves as syncopated movements ready for the dancefloor.
Pulverized
Pulverized encapsulates a sombre and hectic atmosphere. On Bling Ring, a simple reggaeton beat is turned into a slow and heavy pulsation topped with thematic rhythms and a little faster in its tempo. Pulverized enters a more ritualistic soundscape with a steady, unrelenting pulse, distant drums and granulized samples.
Moving Grounds
Moving Grounds delves into tribal ostinatos and ritualistic gestures. Using big drums and a vast array of percussive elements, the ep creates an enveloping aura of danceable movements and ancestral sounds. The opening track, Pantera, sets the mood of the ep with a nolanesque atmosphere and a heavy hitting beat, to be later reprised in the closer Ambush with a faster pace and a groovier feeling. Jump On It fills the gap with a driving syncopated ostinato bouncing all over the track.
Vela
Vela is a granular sampler taking inspiration from Curtis Roads’ pulsar synthesis program. Its key features are the masking capabilities, allowing for rhytmic and stochastic muting of individual grains, and the envelope modulation section, which provides the user with two easy-to-use envelopes to modulate different parameters inside the device, creating movement and directions in each stream without having to draw automations or to manually turn dials.
Compulsion Fissure
Compulsion Fissure by T.U. is a meticulously layered sonic expression built on repetition and rhythmical approaches to sound design. The sound of the whole EP has a very distinctive noisy and growling texture coming from a long feedback chain where the project’s samples get compressed, altered and amplified to enhance their nature before being arranged and intertwined with one another. Reiteration is at the center of this EP as a way to constantly reinvent material without losing its original substance and as a mean to construct sonic narratives that do not require visual elements to tell a story to the listener.
Confined Space
Confined Space stems from the idea of repurposing audio material from YouTube, in an artistic process that values quantity over quality. Random videos are selected using different key words and their audio is chopped and compressed into the DAW to be used as compositional elements. Often scrolling down to get the uploads with the least views, this process is both a reflection on the enormous quantity of material that can be found online and an invitation to use and repurpose digital content in new artistic ways. What is inside the database is not important, its size already makes for an infinite output of ideas.
URL_1
URL_1 is an interactive sound installation. The program is organized as a point and click game containing videos, images and 10 audio tracks that can be played, stopped and mixed by the user. The esoteric layout of URL_1 takes inspirations from ARGs and found footage movies, using audio and video material derived from random YouTube searches to create a new explorable reality. The aim of this installation is to provide a sound experience that involves directly the listener in the creation of an audio composition, without requiring any musical knowledge.
Shifting
With its minimal and rhythm focused atmospheres, Shifting takes on a clinical and experimental approach to the techniques of rhythmic phasing and shifting. On a foundation of straight forward techno-ish grooves, identical patterns are superimposed and displaced to create self-similar versions of themselves and new, ever changing rhythmic combinations. A hypnotic, dance-focused release that uses rhythm as a ritualistic instrument.
Desktop Music
The show is a personal take on Erik Satie’s “Musique d’ameublement” and aims at providing some quality ambience music, revolving around sound design and evolving textures. Each month will feature an original, 1-hour long generative composition that stems from simple melodic ideas and loops to generate ever changing soundscapes.