Motum by Claudio F Baroni

Claudio F Baroni returns to Unsounds with Motum, an album featuring three recent compositions for electronic quartet, organ and string quartet. The thread connecting the works on Motum is – nomen est omen – motion and movement. Baroni explores this central theme in concept and sounds, in his inimitable layered, open and dynamic style. Motum takes the listener on a path from the very origin of sound as air in motion to hitherto uncharted territories. The music originates in myriads of sounding bodies.

The three works on this album “propose unexpected variations on the arithmetics of body, sounds and voice. Each of these pieces in their own way makes it nearly impossible to tell just how many “things” are present; [...] something like a musical diffraction pattern, [...] creating choirs of voices that are never full, always in between silence and song”, as Samuel Vriezen writes in his liner notes. Xenakis-like glissandi and drone harmonies produce mesmerizing and massive panoramic vistas in constant flux in the string quartet 'Perpetuo Motum'.

The subtly detailed atmosphere of 'CirCles II' provides undulating motions: movement between two pitches, gently alternating time signatures. Push and pull, back and forth, odd and even, micro and macro – like an internal variation of one single sonority, one sounding body in ultra slow motion.

Oscillating between organ and silence, 'Solo VIII – AIR', has Baroni move his sound work between both firm ‘bookends’. We aren’t really hearing notes played (although pedals and manual keys are pressed down) as the work consists of the organ’s registration knobs being manipulated with the slowest and most gentle of touches. Vriezen:
“The result is a subdued, unpredictable, fluctuating sonority, an almost-organ, the sound of a complete choir of partial voices, with sometimes hints of a tone emerging.”

Music label for contemporary composition, experimental, improvisation, sound art. Unsounds was founded in 2001 by guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), composer/sound artist Yannis Kyriakides, and designer/visual artist Isabelle Vigier.

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