Torturatori by Paolo Spaccamonti & Paul Beauchamp

One is from the United States, more precisely from North Carolina; the other has origins and ancestors in the south of Italy, in Basilicata. The former is an electro-acoustic musician which uses bows and sounds, electronics and drones; the latter is a guitarist with a visionary and cinemographic aspect but with the weight of his first love, metal. A city unites them having embraced them in different times and ways: Turin, the decayed Italian motor city reborn as a small jewel of transversal culture, ethnic intersections, fruitful interchanges and mutating geniuses.
It is therefore no surprise that the former, Paul Beauchamp, and the latter, Paolo Spaccamonti, met each other; or better to say, found each other in the Sabauda capital through a series of chance meetings indissolubly linked to that calamity among similar people which is music. As well it was not by chance that they wound up making an album together, even if they seem to be quite musically diverse and far from each other, at least at first sight. Or maybe it was by chance considering how this collaboration came to be, having been hypothesized many times, often planned but then postponed and subsequently never taking place: as obvious as it is from the thousands of chats during the long hours on the road on tour that the two were on last year and coming forth from a last minute improv session which occurred in another “magical” location, Argo Laboratorium, the recording studio of Fratto9UnderTheSky owned by Gianmaria Aprile of Luminance Ratio. A single session done by using only the instruments on hand in the studio – the only rule that the two musicians imposed after accepting Aprile’s invitation – in order to have, and at the same time to offer, an instantaneous event able to condense both the experience of the moment (the tour in question) as well as that stated above: the collision of the two seemingly distant worlds that in spite of everything flow into each other and through each other, each one affecting the other and each in turn building a new world equal to and different from the originals and much more than the proverbial sum of the total. The reason being that in the two long tracks, the white side of side A is a negative twin of the black side of side B, the sensibilities of the two artists live and collide together, the suspended guitars of Spaccamonti and the dissonant interventions of Beauchamp, the imagery vision of the former and the detached otherness of the latter, the ability of the first to create cinemagraphic foundations and that of the second to fill in the minute details. Is it psychedelic, is it acid rock, is it post rock? It is music of a certain level and that is enough.

fratto9 sono suoni che solcano un disco.
E' uno sguardo attento, meticoloso, preciso che non ha fretta.
E' la trasposizione di uno sguardo in suono.
E' la conoscenza sensibile di tradurre uno sguardo in musica.
fratto9 é una fotografia in bianco e nero che cattura bellissimi colori.

L.C.

fratto9.blogspot.it