Statement of Intent
The untitled video with which I introduce myself can be interpreted in various ways.
Autobiographical reading: Throughout my childhood, adolescence, and recent university years, I have always experienced minimal movements as rhythm. It is not uncommon for the speed of my walking steps to constitute the tempo of a musical composition, enriched by sensations, images, synesthesia, without any precise order. Time itself is irregular and subject to change within seconds. Individual elements of phrases spoken by me or others, single words, or phrases become the text and rhythmic determinant of the music.
The repetition of the element, in all its variations, or in the same mode repeated to the point of exasperation, is the most practiced pattern. If the word is proparoxytone, the composition will be uptempo; if it is doubly proparoxytone, it will result in downtempo music. If the rhythm of an Italian word is applied to a French word, there are no longer any silent final vowels or consonants, and some consonants are so exaggerated that they are followed by a mute ‘e’, otherwise absent. For example: C’est (La4x2) vo (Si4) tre (La4) po (Sol4) si (Mi5) tio (Si4) n(e mute) (Do5) – pause – c(e mute) (Si4) o (Do5) n(e mute) (Do5) t(e mute) (Si4) r(e mute) (Do5) la (Do5) mi (Si4) enne (Do5).
The scanning of the word becomes unnatural and excessively elongated. The word loses its meaning in favor of greater attention to its form and sound. The process becomes absurd because both the word's accentuation and prosody are not respected. But the scanning could be even more idiosyncratic if we decide to stress all the letters of a word, including consonants (adding a ‘mute e’ at the end of each one), thus extending it excessively.
The distinction between the word as a sign and the word as sound material is a constant in the internal composition process triggered by daily utterances. It is clear that there is a prevalence of the word as sound material detached from its semantics, but it is equally clear that there is a paradigmatic relationship between semantic word and rhythm. Either one exists, or the other does. Instead, there is a syntagmatic relationship between sound material and semantic material, as the presence of one or the other element depends on the presence or absence of a coherent rhythm.
Following such reasoning, the transformation of the everyday into music can take various binary paths. +rhythm or -rhythm; +meaning or -meaning; +intelligible or -intelligible, etc... Through this long chain of oppositions, one of the infinite sound possibilities is finally reached. In my personal case, the various crossroads are deciphered by the nature of the experience I am facing and the degree of perception with which I am internalizing it in the composition process. Thus, for example, a natural element normally perceived as calm, following a violent perception, becomes itself violent and excessive. Likewise, a journey in the noisy Paris metro, full of voices, heat, and discomfort, becomes, following a relaxed perception, the basis of a long litany.
Poetic-vocal reading: Vocal poetry is a musical genre whose origins are debated. The most accredited hypotheses have established that the movement to which the birth of this genre is owed is Russian formalism. Vocal poetry consists of using the voice in all sound possibilities normally unexplored in “mass” music. Demetrio Stratos based his career on the concept of “atrophy of the vocal cords” in the West, where, due to the practice of few vocal modes (breathy, creaky, baby, cry, whistle, etc...) practiced as the only possible ones, all other possibilities (Mongolian throat singing, Sardinian singing, Indian singing, etc...) have been lost. This means that the Western voice is no longer trained and is therefore unable to practice these chants. Clearly, these are strong statements to which various cases of Western singers who have learned those specific registers through targeted teachings can be opposed, but the truth remains of the rare use of them.
Not only that, but the use of the voice in its daily usage in music is also scarce. The speaking voice, the voice in the paroxysmal scanning of words (as shown in the previous paragraph), the solitary voice, outside of any rhythm and any musical base. This is why vocal poetry marries well with minimalism. Both play on the ecstasy of excess. The discomfort of a continuous moan with the prolonged progression of 7-8 notes repeated for an hour. Terry Riley’s "In C," one of the first pieces with a variable duration, which can range from thirty minutes to over an hour, minimalist but also poetic-vocal, is an example of this experimentation. But this is precisely a musical genre.
What would happen, however, if this musical genre were poured into a video? What happens, that is, if the excessive prolongations, the jumps, the too much silence, the too much noise, all the vocal and sound possibilities were represented at a videographic level? It is from this question that my untitled video is born. And it is from this question that the process of its creation also begins. First, the sound was composed, and then, based on the sound, the video was composed. If in a film a stone falls to the ground, it will be accompanied in most cases by the sound of a stone falling to the ground. What happens if we reverse the process, that is, if we let the image emerge from the sound?
There are multiple possibilities from this perspective. It is very likely, first of all, that the video will not run normally at 24 fps, but that it will follow a different type of scanning. This is the case for the entire first section of the video, where the frames scroll one by one, with an irregular time solely dictated by sound jumps. The second aspect to consider is that just as different sounds can correspond to an image, different images can also correspond to a sound, especially if the sound is abstract. For example, in the sound explosion following the turtle section, there are both nature images and video game images, without continuity. The unnatural sound explores in this case two possibilities at opposite ends, united by increasing violence and invasiveness. The third aspect concerns silence. Just as the sound is excessively present, the silence also becomes harassing. Between one section and another, there are silences that in some cases are excessive. The silences, except in some cases, are always accompanied by black, because the image must follow the sound.
Reading the title: Given the overstimulation that generated this video, it is evident that a theme unifying everything is lacking. On one hand, it is pure experimentation; on the other hand, this experimentation arises from my musical studies and is entirely composed of images from my life and archives. What can unify such a chaos of elements? The simplest and most sensible solution is to leave the work untitled. Not only because finding the common thread would be impossible, but also because the presence of a title would imply a tendential and abstract reading of the work, which instead aims to be pure experience and sensation. It is true that such purity can never be achieved for any work, since everything is instinctively contextualized, but the possibility of minimizing the damage remains from this point of view. In the art world, the nomenclature “Untitled” has become so common that it constitutes a meaning in itself, but in the case of my video, this designation is meant in its original sense.
