CD - Touch
The sinking of the Titanic, an inconfutable metaphor of the failure of modern technology and modern times still pervaded by strong class differences, has always provoked intense emotions. An important part of this contemporary mythology is surely reinforced by the stories told by the survivors, who talk about an orchestra (directed by Wallace Hartley) still playing music in the middle of the tragedy, heroically sustaining the logic of 'The Show Must Go On', more that the sad notes of one of the last pieces they played: 'Autumn'. Suggestions that, modulated by Touch on the importance of wireless technologies in communications and music art ('sound once generated never dies', stated Marconi), remind us of the 'semi-random' arrangements by Gavin Bryars, composed in 1969 as a 'semi-open' artwork and now rereleased thanks to the recordings made in 2005 at the Malibran Theater in Venice, with the help of Philip Jeck and the Alter Ego Ensemble. The score, interleaved with morse signals and recorded voices, is a shining example of minimalist logic, played on the repetition and decomposition of very different sound structures.
Aurelio Cianciotta