CD - Touch/Family Affair
Four big and gloomy recordings, made respectively in those who were once public places ("Church", "Auditorium", "Swimming Pool", "Gymnasium"), abandoned military bunkers, within the zone of the nuclear disaster of Chernobyl, an Ukrainian city whose sad fame is due to what happened on April 26, 1986. The author is Jakob Kirkegaard, who explicitly quotes the operative (and theoretical) methods of Alvin Lucier, who, in "I Am Sitting In A Room" (composed in 1969), experimented with conceptual relationships between the spatiality of sound and iteration according to a multiplicative process of recording, playing and again recording (in the same physical space). This action, in the set built by Kirkegaard, is repeated as much as ten times, producing estranging effects and making tangible the aura of alienation and impotence surrounding these places that have become inhabitable. The result of this obsessive investigation of emptiness isn't just the commemoration of a horrible day, but also a coherent and impeccable production, strong both in project and in execution.
Aurelio Cianciotta