"La vita delle conchiglie" (for 2 performers and amplified ensemble) is the first piece of a cycle that deals with the world hidden inside the shells. The piece, as well as the whole cycle is somehow connected and inspired by a Francis Ponge's poem.
"La vita delle conchiglie" (The life of the shells) was premiered by the Ensemble Phace conducted by Nacho De Paz in the Wiener Konzerthaus on February 2021.

Lorenzo Troiani_La vita delle conchiglie_2020

for recordings of satellites, string quartet and electronics

Paris, Centre Pompidou April 18th 2021
Quatuor Diotima

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Achille Judica-Cordiglia and his brother Giovanni Battista are well-known amateur radio operators who claimed in the late fifties and early sixties to have heard radio communications taken from secret Soviet Union space missions, including SOS signals, telemetry, and the dying sounds (heartbeats and breathing) of a suffocating "lost cosmonaut.” Even though their claims have been thoroughly debunked, the stories of these sensational intercepts are part of the mythology of the Space Age and stand at the origin of a durable conspiracy theory.
In the 1960s, the idea of a “lost cosmonaut” spoke to acute fears. Despite the optimism of space exploration tales, the reality of space travel—from sending a dog into orbit to putting a man on the moon—had a striking effect on the public and raised more life-altering questions than it provided answers. A cosmonaut lost in space served as a poignant metaphor for individuals’ anxieties about the future in an era of nuclear tension and uncertainty. This helps to explain the diffusion and the longevity of a hoax that identified the stain of some kind of original sin on the shiny surface of the triumphs of the early space age. Now that the cosmos has switched in our imaginations from being the route toward a radiant future for humanity to a place of accumulation for space capitalism or a post-doomsday shelter for the extremely rich, these stories of dead astronauts are more sinister and haunting than ever.

The title "Memories of the Space Age" is borrowed from the collection of stories of the same name by J.G. Ballard (1988), a set of writings thematically linked around rotting launch gantries at Cape Canaveral, the failure of the US space program, dead astronauts eternally orbiting in space, deserted hotels lining the Florida coast, and the lonely, disturbed individuals who linger at the fringes of this lost dream of the Space Age.

The piece uses more than 100 historical radio recordings of human-made objects gravitating in Low Earth Orbit, for example, the beacon beeps of satellites, telemetries, and the voices of cosmonauts, along with the ill-famed Judica-Cordiglia tapes. This material—shifted and transposed to match the harmonic structure of the piece—is the starting point for an imitation game that involves the string quartet and that grows into a complex three-layered polyphony.

In addition to these archival materials, the electronic material features digital processing of the string instruments with the modulation techniques that were, and still are, commonly used for radio and television transmission. The fragile, inharmonic sonorities of the prepared strings are mirrored by electronic phenomena like feedbacks or physically-modeled chaotic circuits that behave in similarly erratic ways, in a laborious attempt to tame the untamable while at the same time pursuing serendipitous glitches.

"Memories of the Space Age" deals with the aesthetics of ground noise, white noise, and lost radio waves, with the misuse and malfunctions of technology, and with the misinterpretation of a chaotic signal as pareidolia. It is also, somehow, a nostalgic homage to obsolete or soon-to-be-obsolete technologies and to the visions of the future these technologies carried. That future now seems irretrievably lost, but its ghost, like Ballard’s dead astronauts, still haunts us.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

Among the fly ashes and flame’s fulcrum, the origin and destination's nuances are lost into shade's shaping. Meaningless are the relationships between indoor and outdoor world. A plural noise faces the expanse of embers.

Tra le ceneri volanti e il fulcro della fiamma, l’origine e la destinazione si riflettono smarrite nell’evolversi della sfumatura. Insignificanti i rapporti tra mondo interno ed esterno. Un suono plurale si affaccia sulla distesa di braci.

Focolai - Carlo Elia Praderio

Ej Del

cactus rockers / Los Cuñados (MTB＋IKARIYA)

L'emprunte d'Encyclie

Blagoe Molchanie

SenSen - Lago

for promotional purposes only:
Liza Lim: Ronda – The Spinning World (2016)
for 9 musicians: horn, tpt, tbn, harp, perc, vln, vla, vc, dbass + Smetak instruments (Ronda, Tres Sois, Piston Cretino)
Premiere: 25 February 2017, Ensemble Modern conduced by Vimbayi Kaziboni, Alte Oper, Frankfurt
Programme note: https://limprogrammenotes.wordpress.com/2016/12/26/ronda-the-spinning-world-2017/

Liza Lim: Ronda (The Spinning World), 2016

Single tapeloop on Tascam MF-P01 Portastudio. Recorded live to Ableton Live.

Det är alldeles för sent

Please, use headphones or good loudspeakers and PLAY IT LOUD :)

Outer Space (2018), for video, 4 performers, and electronics.
Based on a short film by Peter Tscherkassky (you can watch the film here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yASwqIWjaVI). 
Commissioned by Darmstadt Summer Course. Supported by Ulysses Network, co-funded by Creative Europe Programm.

Live Recording at Centralstation, Darmstadt 2018 
NIKEL Ensemble (Brian Archinal, Yaron Deutsch, Antoine Francoise, Patrick Stadler)
Sound Engineer: Alfred Reiter
Recording: Aaron Holloway-Nahum

Outer Space (2018), for video, 4 performers, and electronics [Please, use headphones!!]

The Canon from 'Kvarteto' by Adrián Demoč, the first movement of his 'Kvarteto' (2017), played by Apartment House - Anton Lukoszevieze, cello, Mira Benjamin, violin, Heather Roche, clarinet & Philip Thomas, piano.  From a portrait CD of Adrián Demoč's music to be released on Another Timbre late in 2019.

Mauro Lanza - "Memories of the Space Age" (2020)

MauroLanza

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