stefano pilia: in girum imus nocte et consumimur igni

Milan based Die Schachtel presents In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (We Turn Round In The Night And, Behold, We Are Consumed By Fire), a work for solo guitar by the Italian composer Stefano Pilia. This marks the second release on a new series on Die Schachtel's imprint, Decay Music. Born in Genoa and based in Bologna, Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer concerned with the sculptural properties of sound, offering particular focus to its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time -- the conceptual undercurrent of In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. Comprised of corresponding compositional triptychs on each of its two sides, the final act of both featuring contributions from experimental music heavyweights, Rodrigo D'Erasmo on violin and David Grubbs on piano, the album builds vast, inhabitable expanses of ambience from long tones and shattered cuts and collisions, punctuated by clusters, sweeps, and careful interventions of texture and note. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni -- as this eerie palindrome and endecasillabo (a syntactic form in classical Italian verse) from Virgil suggests -- moves through a path of alchemical symbolic narratives and poetic abstraction humbly reminiscent and allegorically inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and by the Nekyia ("evocation of the dead") parts found in Book IX of Homer's Odyssey. Based on symmetrical harmonic, melodic and narrative properties and filled with intangible narrative, haunting abstraction, fleeting visions of eerie space, and slow-motion melody, Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni pushes electroacoustic music toward symphonic dimensions -- dramatic arcs with echoes of high minimalism, historic ambient music, and the radicalism indeterminate forms. Through a wise, peculiar and abstracted use of guitar instrumentation, the sound surface of the compositions reaches deeper electroacoustic-symphonic dimensions, echoing minimalist works, ambient music and indeterminate contemporary forms. Pro-printed inner sleeve and jacket, containing a silkscreened PVC sleeve. 180 gram marble vinyl; Edition of 250, one-time pressing.