Written, produced and Mastered by Emanuele Porcinai at Studio Distante, Berlin, 2022.
© & ℗ Stray Signals - WSR, 2023
Artwork by Davide Luciani

There’s a kind of struggle, a kind of restless undercurrent that has occupied electronic music since the advent of digital technologies. An enduring, unresolved tension that has informed many radical turns on the history of the genre. It’s the ever-puzzling relationship between electronically generated –and re-generated– sounds and physicality itself, between the virtualized engineering of sonic ecologies and the sensual, tangible presence of resonant bodies in material space. The ultimately virtual morphology of electronic music has always beautifully contrasted with its sensible immanence. The transposition of electro-acoustics in the digital realm has thus generated new strata of surreality and irreconcilable, though captivating, defiance, blooming in an interspace of emotional, sensual and intellectual activation.

Emanuele Porcinai’s work as WSR has alway sat at the centre of this very contradiction, functionally integrating acoustic –often self-built– instruments within digital frameworks and placing them in a continuum of non-representational happenings that allow the virtual and the material to compenetrate and contain each other, into each other’s aural ghosts. In his compositions, digital phenomena acquire a sense of concrete gravitas that confound their origins into hyperreality, while the tones and produced by corporeal interactions are pulverized, sublimated and re-solidified into emotive simulacra. This allows his music to occupy not one middle point between two evenly spaced opposites, rather a mutable arrangement of every possible combination of the solid and the abstract.

Licensed by Stray Signals, 'Dicasmia' is a new chapter in this research. Ditching the self-built contraptions for more “canonical” guitars, bass guitars and cellos, Porcinai has, through months of solitary and obsessive studio work, dug himself an introspective mine of aural ore posed to slowly sucking its surrounding space in. The tracks that compose the album feel like suspended on the event horizon of this double thrust, their densest components dilated and pierced by shards of contaminated harmony. Melodies form from clouds of smoke riddled with literal heavy metals while impacts and scrapes form uneven percussive poems. The amassing layers of dissonance eventually favor the emergence of musicality and beauty, making for an eventually uplifting sonic venture that strives to exorcise the melancholy of separation.

DICASMIA mix 1

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