U26 | Claudio Parodi | Prima del terzo
3. merahèfet : excerpt
4. al penè : excerpt
format : CD ltd to 200 hand numbered copies
all copies come with an additional art card on 300gr satin paper
release year : 2015
length : 57’27
tracks :
1. vrúah
2. Elohím
3. merahèfet
4. al penè
5. hammàim
status : still available
>>> order via Paypal : chalkdc@unfathomless.net
(Belgium) : 14 € (inc.postage)
(Europe) : 15 € (inc.postage)
(World) : 16 € (inc.postage)
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: info :
One of my favourite walk is in the harbour of my hometown, because of the sound brought by the wind. For long time I have day-dreamt about including that sound in my own music. I got to the point reading the poem Prologo al buio by Erri De Luca (from Opera sull’Acqua e altre poesie, Einaudi 2002). In the poem there is a Hebraic quote from Genesis, before the third verse (hence the title of my composition, the Italian for “before the third”): “vrúah Elohím merahèfet al penè hammàim”, that means, translating from the Italian translation by De Luca, “and the wind of God breaths on the faces of the waters”. The music was already there, it was just a matter of recording it.
Nothing against pure field recording. But, as the inspiration came from the very root of Hebrew culture, I felt to go deeper. My dear friend Prof. Maria Rosa Montiani taught me everything of the very little I know about Hebrew culture.
I planned five field recordings, one for each Hebrew word (in Hebrew, “al penè” is written as a single word). Referring to the map of the harbor, the recorder was placed five times from top right to bottom left, imitating the direction of Hebraic writing. The date and the length of the field recordings were chosen following the value given by qabbaláh to each word. As an example, vrúah is 4, so the first field recording (four minutes plus two seconds fade in and two seconds fade out) happened on the fourth hour of the fourth day of Cheshvàn, the second month of Hebrew calendar, that is, on October the 20th, 2012, 23.16, and so on for five months.
The field recordings were later re-shaped in studio imitating the Ashkenaze ductus of the letters of the words: panning for left to right and reverb to no reverb for top to bottom.
(Claudio Parodi, March 2013)
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: reviews :
I don’t trust field recordings. I’ve probably said this before, but I mean a certain type of field recordings: the ones with a pretence to authenticity. It’s a double whammy against their credibility as art. On the first count, there’s a failure to account for or even consider the role of mediation, be it technical (e.g. microphones) or subjective (e.g. editing, selection). On the other, they claim aesthetic failure as a virtue (“It’s boring, but that’s how it really happened!”). This approach inevitably leads to deceit, as bad novelists sell their crude fictions as searing autobiography and bad stage magicians parade their crude tricks as revelations of psychic powers.
You will note that I did not dismiss all types of field recording. They can be beautiful, important, but they can stubbornly resist becoming art. As with collage in the visual arts, the raw material can be so seductively rich and the means of composing with them so facile, that resulting work can be less than the sum of its parts: a vampire aesthetic.
Every warning is a challenge, so it’s interesting to find the different ways in which the problem can be tackled. (Plug: I’ve tried this myself, using various ways of foregrounding technical intervention in a sonic landscape.) As mentioned in my last post, I’ve been listening to a recent CD by Claudio Parodi which is composed from field recordings.
Prima del terzo comes across at first as soft, ambient noise. Faint details emerge and it becomes clear that you are listening to a space, or rather a place. The location is not immediately obvious to the casual listener; it may well be a montage of recordings superimposed. Then come some sudden shifts in perspective – not of the listener, but of the landscape as it suddenly moves its focus from left to right in the stereo spectrum.
Something is going on beyond simple documentation but the exact nature isn’t clear. “Nothing against pure field recording. But,” Parodi writes, “I felt to go deeper.” The recordings were made to capture the wind, heard while walking around the harbour in Parodi’s home town of Chiavari. The movements of the sound trace out the strokes of lettering in Hebrew words. The actions are redolent of some sort of ritual, both in walking out the paths for the recording and in their manipulation in the studio. The purpose of the ritual, however, remains obscure to the listener.
There’s a weird balance here between the deeply subjective process which led to this set of pieces being made, and the objective impenetrability of the process to the listener. For some reason it reminded of some of Alvin Lucier’s music, where an arbitrary object can become an irreducible fact in determining sounds. (He’s also written a piece called Letters.) There’s also a similar element of quiet subversion. Five pieces of wind, never rising to a storm but liable to suddenly change.
Ben Harper
Boring Like A Drill
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L’ambiente sonoro del Porto Turistico Internazionale di Chiavari (Genova) catturato tramite uno Zoom.
Ad ispirar quest’uscita (la ventiseiesima) per il progetto/label Unfathomless (edizioni limitate di riflessioni sonore, circa lo spirito dei luoghi e il loro riverbero interiore), ci entra l’arte della passeggiata, l’urto del vento, una citazione ebraica dalla Genesi tratta da un libro di Erri De Luca, le considerazioni annesse e le illuminazioni connesse.
Una serie di cinque registrazioni di campo, eseguite e successivamente editate attenendosi in ogni fase ad una sovrapposizione di elementi (parola, numeri e ricorrenze temporali) che ne determinano lunghezza, posizionamento microfonico e l’attimo esatto della ripresa stessa.
I materiali viaggian di pan fra un canale e l’altro, aperti e chiusi da click smussati, s’intubano e isolano, offrendo panoramiche inedite ed eventi improvvisi, divisori e descrittivi.
A tarda notte e alle prime luci presumibilmente.
Cordame in attorcigliamento (strangolante/costante), gabbiani venefici in richiamo, portuali solitari immersi in silenziosa attività, qualche ferraglia in ciclico tintinnio e il rumore di fondo dell’universo.
Nulla è immobile.
Tutto risuona.
Strato su strato (come pelle).
Marco Carcasi
Kathodik
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Sans image : il y a la présence de la mer – en tout cas celle du vent qui, même de loin, la ramènerait. On aura beau tendre l’oreille, cette mer n’est-elle pas en fait la rumeur d’un trafic à moteurs ? Certes moins oppressant que celui qu’Akio Suzuki nous fit entendre en Tubridge 99-00, mais quand même…
Il suffira d’ouvrir la pochette du disque pour trouver trois photos-indices : un port, celui (lira-t-on) de Chiavari, en Ligurie. C’est là que vit Claudio Parodi et c’est là qu’il s’est promené, Zoom H2 en main, pour répondre au souhait du label Unfathomless, qui est celui de publier des « phonographies » capables de rendre l’esprit d’un endroit.
Ce qui interpelle, dans le cas de Parodi, est qu’il dit avoir écrit Prima del Terzo après avoir récolté ses premiers enregistrements de terrain et avant d’avoir attrapé les derniers éléments qui la constitueront. Il y a donc bien « composition » : le passage d’une oreille (ou enceinte) à l’autre est d’ailleurs l’un de ses partis pris. Rumeur des transports, clapotis de l’eau, grincements de quels objets de métal, bruit de câbles claquant contre les mâts de bateaux, jets de bouteilles en conteneur en guise d’unique chanson de fin de soirée… Le Chiavari de Parodi est discret car quasi désert, ses bateaux semblent à l’abandon, et l’humanité qui les a désertés fait un bruit de déchet. Si l’on résume : tout pour plaire.
Guillaume Belhomme
Le Son Du Grisli
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The title for Claudio Parodi’s first Unfathomless effort refers to Genesis 1:2, which describes wind rushing over the waters of an unformed creation. Light, and the separation of day and night, follow; the sky and land come even later. It’s a well-chosen title, as much of the musical material on Prima del terzo is little more than the sound of wind and water captured by a Zoom H2 Handy Recorder. Birds, car engines, the occasional voice, and other clanging sounds figure into various passages, but they all happen at a distance, caught coincidentally rather than purposefully. Many sections are so quiet that the cuts Parodi makes and the noise floor of H2 itself are as noticeable as the field recordings.
Those edits stick out though, as does the unflinching dedication to the source material, even when it is practically inseparable from the rumble and hiss of background noise. Parodi methodically recorded five different locations around Chiavari, Italy’s harbor using rules derived from Kabbalistic tradition, then edited them according to the conventions of Hebraic writing. All of this would be impossible to decode without help from the label’s website, but the extra context helps situate why and how Parodi approached these apparently untouched recordings. Moving air and slowly accreting ephemera give way to a few sudden bursts of activity in the album’s second half, but they only resolve into more near-silence and more out-of-doors ambience. Just the slightest hint of intervention exists within each track and each track admits of only the slightest information about where it was recorded, or during what time of day. Chiavari may have been the inspiration, but the music breaks free of borders and places and times. It’s a project devoted to stillness, which is somehow recognizable only in the way things move around it.
Lucas Schleicher
Dusted Magazine
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The mission statement of Unfathomless Records ; To bring thematic series focusing on phonographies reflecting the spirit of a specific place crowded with memories, its aura and resonances….. And indeed again number 26 in the series is another story from the series with dark rumblings and vague microphone posturing that just like earlier reviewed releases (Kassel Jaeger, Philip Sulidae) tries to create the ultimate elusive lo-fi field recording; remote locations, desolate, romantic and frightening without ever losing sight on atmosphere.
According to the liner notes, the idea of Parodi was to document the sounds and different silences found in the harbor of his hometown. It resulted in a symbiosis of sounds recorded when wandering empty streets whilst following links with complex cabbala patterns and meanings. When reading this it felt like a paragraph almost directly stolen from Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum.
All though it probably is, Prima Del Terzo does not sound very studio ‘processed. It has that microphone reverb, picking up much more then maybe intended, creating an atmosphere of pure desolation. The first scenes stay true their origin, recordings of a desolate area, the sounds of water moving and air escaping. When walking even more into solitary, the scenes get more and more processed and subtle changes give things an even psychedelic aspect, but the listener is most likely not aware of that anymore by then.
This label is very much capable of creating stuff that gets you out of your head easily, taking the listener to somewhere else, another place. Played at high volume (and there’s no other choice, as these treated field recordings are carefully transposed to disk at very low volumes) a rich plethora of details unfolds, or so it feels at least because listening in solitude to something like this it becomes hard to tell what was recorded and supposed to be heard and that what was not>whatever it was that crept in (or not) during the journey for sure adds to the overall experience it. Observing a alienating footage of a silent world, underwater.
Pim van der Graaf
Progress Report
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The source of this release by experienced sound artist and musician Claudio Parodi is the international leisure harbour of his hometown Chiavari, nearby Genoa, which should be a particularly windy place as you can guess during the listening of this release. The expectancy of listeners who approach to sounds that could be heard in a windy harbour got fully met as seagulls, noise of distant engines, waves, distant traffic, chatting people, birds and similar resounding entities could be found. You can assume that such a premise could fit the usual “nothing wrong, but nothing special” label for a release based on field recordings, but besides the location and the strange transitional effects, where you can sometimes think that Claudio simulates temporary deafness in listener by sudden channeling on the right or the left speaker, the criteria for assemblage and recordings and their connection with the intimate perception of the composer/grabber are quite unusual : named after the words of a Hebraic quote from Genesis before the third verse (that’s why he titled the album “Prima del terzo”, Italian for “before the third”), that he read on Erri De Luca’s poem “Prologo al Buio” which can be translated as “and the wind of God breaths on the faces of the waters”, each title of each recording includes instructions about the date and the length of the field recordings you’re going to listen. With the support of Prof.Maria Rosa Montiani, he derived the value of each word according to kabbalah and such a value became the length of each field recording, which got recorded on the -Nth hour of the -Nth day (where N is the derived value) of each month from Cheshvan, the second month of Hebrew calendar, that departs on October 20th on Gregorian calendar. Each field recording was later re-shaped in studio on the basis of the Ashkenaze ductus of the letters of the words by means of panning from left to right, reverb to no-reverb, top to bottom. The final result of this accurate release deserves a listening. It comes out on (200) hand-numbered copies by Unfathomless, the Belgian sister-label of Mystery Sea.
Vito Camarretta
Chain D.L.K.
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Il campo di registrazione e la sua veste emotiva
Uno dei dibattiti meno conosciuti ma pregni di significato è quello sorto intorno agli anni ottanta circa le qualità emotive di quelle opere che si basano esclusivamente sulla registrazione in presa diretta di un ambiente sonoro definito a vario titolo: la tecnica del campo di registrazione, ossia il piazzamento di uno o più microfoni in posti appositamente scelti in base alle prospettive del compositore, è stata rimessa in discussione non tanto nei suoi aspetti pratici (anzi da questo punto di vista si è arricchita) quanto in quelli teorici, con forti conseguenze sull’apprezzamento e sul tipo di recepimento da parte dell’ascoltatore.
Il dibattito si poggia su tre interpretazioni fondamentali adeguatamente supportate dalla realtà storica: la prima di esse si riferisce alla funzione primaria attribuita al campo sin dalla sua nascita e che certamente non morirà mai; non vi è dubbio che tutto il lavoro svolto da Lomax o Cowell abbia avuto il merito della documentazione di certi eventi che fino al primo novecento era impossibile ritrarre; registrare canti, cerimoniali o funzioni religiose rivestiva una consuetudine dei popoli aventi posizioni sperdute agli antipodi del mondo, ma adempiva ad una propedeutica funzione che servisse lo studio dei musicologi ed etno-musicologi, anche nelle dovute sedi accademiche. Questa indiscutibile basilarità va conciliata con quanto successe nel mondo dei suoni grazie alle scoperte di Schaeffer nella musica ritenuta concreta: la registrazione di un treno o anche della stessa voce umana tramite semplice microfonazione rispondeva al bisogno collaterale di costruire delle nuove configurazioni sonore a cui era impossibile donare risultati che potessero andare oltre il mero compiacimento dei suoni stessi. Il fatto che esistessero rumori o pseudo-suoni rinvenienti dalla realtà naturale o artificiale era aspetto che andava coordinato con la principale attività di composizione svolta nei luoghi deputati alla loro manipolazione, come materiali scultorei.
La terza circostanza, quella che scatenò il dibattito, prese origine dalle affermazioni di uno degli esponenti più avanzati del settore, lo spagnolo Francisco Lopez, che sulla base delle considerazioni ambientaliste fornite dal canadese Schafer, indicò come sia riduttivo considerare un lavoro di field recordings come semplice art performance, invitando a considerare le dinamiche con cui i suoni vengono catturati e presentati alla stessa stregua di un panorama sonoro di qualsiasi genere. Andare oltre la semplice affermazione che musica è comporre e, come paventato da Cage, tendere a cogliere gli aspetti benefici e subdoli che rivelano un carattere dell’ambiente sonoro, del tutto speciale, con caratteristiche tali da preservare persino l’attività del compositore (che sembrerebbe dopato da un meccanico rilevamento); il compositore sceglierebbe in maniera preventiva i posti da registrare basandosi sulla propria ispirazione, quella del sentito naturale, determina i tempi del campo aprendo o stoppando la registrazione in determinati momenti, tende a catturare gli attimi indispensabili per creare l’emotività dei suoni.
Non vi è dubbio che è già sorta da tempo un’ottima letteratura al riguardo, con artisti di tutto il mondo che, presi dal fascino di paesaggi e dalle possibilità offerte dalla realtà urbana, hanno ritratto il “campo” fornendo intelligenti e affascinanti rappresentazioni che non hanno nulla da invidiare al benessere profuso da un qualsiasi lavoro musicale. Facendo qualche nome importante senza ordine temporale pensiamo a Luc Ferrari del Presque Rien e Michel Redolfi in Francia, Chris Watson, David Toop e Peter Cusack in Inghilterra, Annea Lockwood in Nuova Zelanda, Francisco Lopez in Spagna, Christina Kubich e Hildegard Westerkamp in Germania, Douglas Quin, Alvin Lucier e Jeph Jerman in America, Geir Jenssen e Jana Winderer in Norvegia, Toshiya Tsunoda e Hiroki Sasajima in Giappone. In Italia un’ottimo lavoro è stato fatto da Davide Tidoni. Una novità tutta da considerare a livello estetico è quella della prospettiva letteraria del campo puro, smistata da Claudio Parodi nel suo primo lavoro del genere intitolato Prima del Terzo, un cd ottenuto sottoponendo a microfonazione il porto turistico di Chiavari, suo paese d’origine. Qui si scarica sul fattore ambientale un poema di Erri De Luca, Prologo, in cui una citazione ebraica avrebbe l’onere di riversarsi nei suoni del vento, dell’acqua e dei passanti: “and the wind of God breaths on the faces of the waters” è un’immaginazione tematica inglobata nei suoni del campo. Sebbene le tracce spesso sono volutamente rimodulate con passaggi-ripristino da un canale d’ascolto all’altro, influendo negativamente sulla presa complessiva dell’ambiente sonoro, il lavoro di Parodi rende bene l’idea di quello che si può creare sotto un semplice field recording, aggiungendo significativi risultati che spezzano una lancia a favore di quelle operazioni simil-spiritiche sulle quali invece si dovrebbe meglio indagare. E i giganteschi ed invasivi campi di registrazioni subacquatici creati da Michel Redolfi devono oggi far riflettere ancor di più sulle enormi prospettive che si potrebbero aprire di fronte a questo potente mezzo di persuasione musicale.
Ettore Garzia
Percorsi Musicali
Unfathomless 