valerio tricoli: clonic earth

The experimental Italian composer, Valerio Tricoli, returns to PAN with a new album, Clonic Earth. His ongoing output for the label has long-presented his electroacoustic sound compositions which utilizes analog live sampling and real-time editing of field and studio recordings by manipulation of 1/4 inch tape. Asides from being a founding member of the Italian avant-rock group 3/4HadBeenEliminated, he has worked extensively with various musicians, choreographers and multimedia artists including Thomas Ankersmit, Antoine Chessex, Werner Dafeldecker, Anthony Pateras, and Robert Piotrowicz. His studio compositions often explore themes of the internal - psychological and physical - and of the occult, which, with the use of spoken text, makes them often deeply existential works, self-investigations of the irrational horror within. Clonic Earth is a perturbing, yet compelling mind-expanding work, marked by compositional strategies of exploded narratives, psychological insight and oracular literary references, where questions about the boundaries of spatial perception in the decoding processes of acousmatic music. Tricoli's allegorical and philosophical universe takes the form of an unhinged mind's landscape swarming with estranged sound objects in the complexity of details and surrealistic effects of Hieronymus Bosch's larger paintings. Compared to his previous works, the content of Clonic Earth explores more synthesized and heavily processed sounds, especially vocals, often appearing in the form of a religious, electrified chanting. The record is described by its author as a natural consequence of the internal collapse depicted in his previous record, Miseri Lares (PAN 044LP): "As if all the debris left inside my loudspeakers have been ignited to expand into the ether, to find a justification at the principle of Chaos, or Cosmos alike." This movement is expressed by references to the theme of fire as original matter in the Chaldean Oracles which, together with the later work of Philip K. Dick, are the main sources for the vocal/text elements of the composition. Fire serves the author a metaphor for the acousmatic listening experience itself: a borderline perception of sounds eternally fixed in their spasmodic disappearance, which could eventually drag us into a different layer of reality, drastically changing, subverting, or expanding the space in which they are diffused. A ritual, somehow, which may link the listener and the perceptive space that he inhabits with whatever lies beyond the loudspeakers - beyond the vibrating surface of the world. Mastered and cut by Rashad Becker at D&M. Artwork by Bill Kouligas.