"With The Suncrows Fall And Tree, Pilia has created an electroacoustic work that uses drones as a major compositional tool, but to achieve effects that are striking and unusual. Avoiding sonic gestures associated with one or another school of electroacoustics, and not creating a work entirely of blissful ambience, Pilia has concocted a very impressive electroacoustic debut." Caleb Deupree
“Pilia’s subsonic drones are a thing of beauty; pulling in and pushing the listener away simultaneously, keeping him or her in a constant state of limbo.. in all things Stefano Pilia does, there is an understated and simple beauty beneath them. It acts like a silent guide, making sure everything goes off without a hitch”. Brad Rose / Foxy Digitalis
For a slab of marble to be transformed into a face, aardvark or the like, the image needs already be written into the logical structure of the marble itself. Similarly, certain words are simply logically compatible with others. In contrast, the title The Suncrows Fall and Tree, like the phrase ‘Thursday drinks procrastination’, speaks of something out of joint. The album has a stream of conscious sort of coherence and sense of time and place. Individual compositions are a fragmented yet linked series of evocations, excursions into the void awoken by almost improvisatory plunges into the here and now. The first of two twenty-minute drone-pieces focuses on brittle shards of guitar, swarming amplified whir and showers of static drizzle. The pieces layer upon layer of psychoacoustic trickery aside, now and again mangled guitar curls, murmurs and clangs come together in an act of mimicry, slyly conveying nature’ sustaining presence in this delusional temporal continuum. As controlled yet fiercely buzzing guitar noise begins to crest, a new portal swings open that allows dreary nonsensical noise and meaningful sounds of nature to reach a synthesis, a sort of flickering between presence and absence.
After long, uninterrupted passages of sinister sounding atmospheres, a crack of lightening acts like a tremor of light illuminating the nearly forgotten surroundings and reminding one that they are profoundly worldly, however distorted and bleak they may be. The piece is also punctuated by arrangements that are hauntingly sparse. Besides making apparent that these works, for all their emphasis on strophic structures, are carefully paced and meticulously played, these near-silences act like a murky swamp whose indistinct surface and depth enables certain elements to hide, transform and reemerge in other forms. Indeed, the album as a whole has the appeal of such an indistinct surface, one whose uncertainty proves absorbing and whose shifting nature reflects numerous forms of deviance. CyclicDefrost - Max Schaefer
credits
released October 1, 2006
Composed, recorded and mixed by Stefano Pilia between january 2003 and october 2005 in Bologna, Milano, Codroipo and Arbatax using the following soundsources and devices: electric guitar, field recordings , microphones, sine waves, piano, ptape noise, pvc tubes, instruments played by wind and filters. Andrea Belfi plays high synth frequencies in "The Three".
PLAY IT LOUD
photos by Stefano Pilia
Thanks for the contribution and support from
Andrea Belfi, Massimo Carozzi, Rob Forman, Giuseppe Ielasi, Giulia Pezzoli, Valerio Tricoli
Thanks also to Boris Battistini, Vittoria Burattini, John Duncan, Dean Roberts, Black Forest Black Sea, Medves, 3/4HadBeenEliminated, ZImmerfrei
Stefano Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer. His work has become progressively concerned with researching
the sculptural properties of sound as well as sound’s relationship with space, memory and the suspension of time. Pilia explores these points of focus through instrumental practice and investigations into the recording and production process....more
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