“Slowless”???
Was it spelled like that on purpose? Did “Slowness” constitute the initial intention? I’d be willing to know if there’s a secret rationalization behind this word, a silly curiosity of mine that shouldn’t detract from the crystalline grace of this release, entirely realized – one would say – with a guitar and a computer yet sounding as a million different things.
Luigi Archetti, an Italian-born Swiss resident, is a regular presence on the experimental scene of the last decades. Besides being a guitarist and composer, he also works in the visual field (painting, installations, drawing and video) and has collaborated with a veritable who’s who of fringe artists around the globe, including Iva Bittova, Guru Guru’s Mani Neumeier, Cluster’s Dieter Moebius, Bill Horist, Taku Sugimoto, Can’s Michael Karoli and Damo Suzuki, Bo Wiget, just to list a few. Lots of dissimilar visions, many of them probably influencing the man’s inventiveness in a way or another.
The nineteen “Fragments” develop hundreds of links and connections between silence, noise and understanding of vibratory phenomena through fundamental gestures, improvisations captured by their originator in critical (…cryptic?) intelligibility then subjected to a systematic treatment which not only renders the original source almost untraceable and, in some cases, completely extraneous, but literally alters our methods of approaching a recording by “looking forward to something”. Archetti gives a short illusion of familiarity then shifts the burden of pulsation elsewhere, often abruptly, otherwise gradually, always settling on the accurate spot where “that” ringing chord (or inharmonious symptom, for that matter) makes all the sense in the world. It’s a phantasmagoria of misshapen outlines and nearly irrational timbres, the axe as a sound generator over and done in favour of an overpowering logic of non-belonging: a cruel condition for an ordinary individual to be in, absolute nirvana for those who don’t care a iota about social relationships and choose to actually behave as a living organism, thriving in the hallowed name of resonance - both corporeal and intellectual.
By pulverizing anticipation via drastic transformations of six-stringed realities, this discreet gentleman stimulates reflexes and gratitude at once, rewriting the guidelines of how an investigational guitar album should be designed while heightening the considerable necessities of people who need to be set apart from insubstantial music and diminutive IQs.
Domizil
