ORIGINAL MUSIC / Original Music Meike Clarelli
SOUND DRAMATURGY / Sound Dramaturgy Davide Fasulo, Meike Clarelli
Chorus / Choir Conductor Davide Fasulo
WITH THE VOICES OF / With the voices of
Meike Clarelli
Elizabeth Dallargine
Vincenzo Destradis
David Fasulo
Fulvia Gasparini
Antonio Tavoni
Recording / Recording
Davide Cristiani – Bombanella Studio
Recorded at Levizzano Castle in July 2020
thanks to the artistic residency supported by the Culture Sector of the Municipality of Castelvetro Rangone (MO) /
Recorded at Castello di Levizzano in July 2020 during an artistic residence with the support of the Culture Section of the town of Castelvetro Rangone (MO)
Live recording made at the Quaroni Theater in La Martella, Matera
on the occasion of Altofest Matera Basilicata Abitare Futuro curated by Teatringestazione in December 2019 for Matera 2019 European Capital of Culture /
Recording of the live performance took place at Teatro Quaroni de la Martella, in Matera,
during Altofest Matera Basilicata Abitare Futuro, by TeatrInGestAzione in December 2019, part of the celebration of Matera 2019, European Cultural Capital
BY / Curated by Federica Rocchi
TRANSLATIONS / Translations Robert Lincoln Hackett
ARTWORK Sara Garagnani
Thanks to /Thanks to Serena Terranova, Silvia Tagliazucchi /.
MUSICAL EDITIONS / Record label
A Buzz Supreme Srl
EDITOR / Editor
Kunstverein Publishing, Milan
ISBN 978-88-32125-05-4
PRINTED BY / Printed by
CdStar
LIMITED EDITION / LIMITED EDITION 500p.
Finished printing in 2021 / Printed in 2021
PRODUCTION / Production Collective Amigdala, 2021 – www.collettivoamigdala.com Ⓟ 2021, Collective Amigdala.
© 2021, Amigdala Collective, Kunstverein Publishing, Milan, Italy
All rights reserved, including the right of total or partial reproduction in any form / All rights reserved, any total or partial reproduction in public is prohibited in any form
This record grew out of Elementare, a performance project curated by the Amigdala Collective that calls audiences and artists to share the time of one night.
Six slowly consuming voices, the exercise of a presence between artists and audience without certain boundaries, words slowly clumping and dripping on a white sheet: these are the primary elements through which a shared poetic space is fabricated. As we form a vocabulary, almost a collective prayer, as we make the gesture of lighting a symbolic fire in the space between us and others, Elemental declares the effort of a choral duration.
Elemental is first and foremost an experience: both for those who perform it, making their song continue through the hours of the night and taking it to where control and precision are lost, to find an unexpected part of themselves; and for those who enjoy it, falling asleep, forcing themselves to wakefulness or being unable to do otherwise, as a ritual that tastes like a promise. In both cases, it is the singing that dictates the tempo and the poetry that drives the anticipation.
In the construction of Elemental, in fact, the three elements-rite, song and poetry-have engaged in combat, producing a dramaturgical and architectural structure that makes them their own basic working tools. A song that does not necessarily say is the minimal unit of measure of Elementary, which becomes voice before language, and from which only at times possible figures of meaning emerge.
This record was born out of a desire to transform Elemental’s performance experience into a place of resonance that can expand the boundaries of its live occurrence. The recording space opens another mode, that of a language that enters the circle and makes the voices of the six singers vibrate differently. Indeed, Elementary is a layered process, within which encounters and exchanges have matured over the years, on which the landscape of the project has gradually been nurtured. The texts signed by Gabriele Dalla Barba given here formed the fertile ground from which the imagery of the performance sprang. Poetic language that, like a fiery magma, provided the impetus for bringing the songs and the dramaturgical structure to life, thanks to the joint work of the Amigdala Collective and the generosity of the six shaman-singers. Through a performative happening that enters into close relationship with the host spaces, Elemental has produced different acoustic spaces with each replication.
Thus, this record contains two sound forms:
the tracks on the vinyl were recorded at Castello di Levizzano (MO), specially transformed by Davide Cristiani into a never-before-seen recording studio among vaults, ravines and underground reverberations; the live track accessible from the special link, on the other hand, constitutes a very special bonus track, and allows to listen to the entire night performance collected at Teatro Quaroni in Borgo La Martella for Altofest 2019 in Matera.
The record also collects and develops the visual work done by Sara Garagnani over the course of several performances, which includes the patient writing of sheets during the night, on which the artist lets poetic words drip with the calligraphic precision of an endless ritual, as well as the creation of the moonscape in which this record project is immersed.
Finally, the disc contains a look at Elementare by Claudia Losi, an artist and friend with whom Meike Clarelli and Amigdala have established a mutually nurturing relationship around the vocal question and its relationship to the landscape. The centrifugal force of this experience therefore led us to conceive this object, which not only involves sensibilities directly related to the source, but was also able to meet the publishers and curators of Kunstverein Milano and their sensitivity to hybrid art productions.
The circle of Elementary closes neither in theater nor in music in the strict sense, but in a further work that assembles, gathers and sews together pieces of the world and specific knowledge. Not only, then, the testimony of an accomplished feat but also the need to continue to fabricate new opportunities for meaning that have chorality as a model of resistance at their core, and durability and its toil as antidotes to the consumption of the present.
– Federica Rocchi
From here you can purchase the LP and/or listen to it on streaming:
– tailoring by Penelope Recupera
These are some of the questions that in recent years direct the way I look at landscapes, natural and man-made. Questions that come thanks, in particular, to the friendship and exchange born with Meike Clarelli, who accompanied (and still accompanies) me by the hand, taking care of my words and guiding the choirs from time to time involved in the projects we have built together. The voices that traverse and set the space in motion.
Elemental raises a complementary image: the voices linking to each other, clinging, tossing, tumbling together and resuming, like a dirge igniting a space, where the body of those singing and listening remains still and moving is all the time around. The singers are voices-woodland stretching their roots, tightening and loosening their grip, making the audience lose their bearings as if in a dream. If sleep comes, it is a conscious slumber that seeks foothold in the words that take shape on the hand-painted sheets, like a logbook or an embroidered dowry. A slumber shared with others, who can see you sleeping, in the state of your utmost vulnerability, and meanwhile the voices of the singers take you far from there, make the listener vibrate on an aimless journey into a temporal vastness that is difficult to define.
Elementary is an experience of the body in time, a letting go of six voices as to a plural guide who will point out how to cross a glacier and the ghosts-creep of its soul of ice and stone. In dissolution.
– Claudia Losi
A long, relentless exposure to voice and a cappella music with the idea of observing what is happening, enjoying its mystery, welcoming a change and tending to be what is sung for a night.
The music of Elementary was to be able to be an essential idiom, a language with which to meet and no longer be alone. I wanted it to be direct, deep, disruptive, circular, intense. I wanted the experience of singing, as a practice of freedom and presence, to be of great emotional intensity, open to as many genres as possible, and with a polyphonic rendering that would also match the breath of sleep of those being watched. All this in a time as deformable and indeterminate as the night, in a way that is both raw and delicate.
We were fortunate to have six musician-singers, including myself, in love with the voice, with completely different body aptitudes and backgrounds, able to cover a large part of the “human” register, and a medium/illustrator at the center to make visible with writing what is not seen, but felt.
This human richness is a foundational part of the musicality of the work. Musical composition at first was spontaneous, primitive, casual. Lonely. Some structures of the songs were deliberately left open, like a suspended speech, so that they could be lost in the improvisations of the singers or flow like a stream into the river of another song.
The work of refinement, curation and sound dramaturgy is by Davide Fasulo, who guides the choir during the performance, leading them to an extemporaneous recomposition of the songs that over the course of the night are repeated several times, like echoes and references, according to a precise ritual scansion. To sing is to welcome the unexpected, to burn out, to lose your coordinates, to dose, to plummet, moment by moment, to have a vision, to hold together, and finally to let go of everything.
– Meike Clarelli
– One of the texts written by Gabriele Dalla Barba contained in the publication
