vital004
2020 élan vital recordings

Imagine being able to live forever in a small, warm, intimate home. A mental space, a haiku. Imagine feeling the walls of this environment, gently touching them with your fingertips, savoring the essence of its thousand past inhabitants. Now you’re in charge, a humble guardian of the secrets of this peaceful environment. A domestic place, close but at the same time unknown and nostalgic.

You are the keeper of this small house, of this mental space forever. We need to return to an intimate and thoughtful listening. We deeply need a spiritual rebirth, a self-medication. We must go back to being the only explorers of our deepest essence.

Now you’re in this warm and small space, lost in a forest of paper and smoke.

These three improvisations have been deliberately recorded with worn out equipment: a tiny sampler, a Korg Poly 800, burned and rigorously in mono, a small hand recorder. Rosalegno was recorded directly on a 50-year-old TAYA, where you can hear the decadence of the tape towards the second half of the song and where the wobbling becomes more intense, reminding of a cry.

The album is a tribute to the so called New Age on cassette era, to those old Harmony tapes that accompanied the childhood of some of us. There is a need to revive that self-discovery, knowing how to isolate oneself and believe in what makes us feel really good. That is why the tape version of the album L’abbaglio was multiplied or actually recycled, on old 90's tape albums, so the whole nostalgic feeling, hauntology concept and cassette tribute cycle is complete.

We are the keepers of our mind, forever.

Carlo Giustini is a field recordings, tape manipulator, sound researcher and experimental musician based in Treviso, Italy. His music combines field recordings, warm organic drones and deep haunted sounds caught with contact microphones on micro-cassette recorders and other old audio gear. His previous albums released on the labels Lontano, Shummering Moods, ACR, Purlieu, No Rent and Bad Cake Records, attracted huge attention between the ambient music community.

mastering: Andrea Porcu 
cover design: Noah MacDonald

released March 27, 2020 
buy the album elanvital.bandcamp.com/album/l-abbaglio

Carlo Giustini - Santosia

élan vital recordings