Alighiero Boetti is one of the artists I love more. He had found the center of his world far from Turin, where he was born and raised. Not exactly around the corner. In Afghanistan. He had planted his roots there, starting up a hotel in Kabul as a logical consequence of his wandering artistic itinerary. At a point he split his name into Alighiero&Boetti, thus doing justice to his maniacal obsession with numbers, 2 and especially 11, the twin number. It all adds up. James Tenney had also undergone in the same years the fascination with numbers and oriental philosophies. Critical Band is the manifesto of a method assimilated at the beginning of the 70s that sees the sound at the center of the investigation, with its ambiguity, its microscopic recesses, its linearity. Its power. A concept, like Boetti’s, so pure that it is transmuted into a work. Of art. After his arrival in Venice in the early 1960s and a relative period of crisis, Alvin Lucier seems to have found an unstoppable vein of creativity. In his work, the physical phenomenon turns into a poetic element, translated into a purely musical object. A deeply contemplative approach, aimed at the magic and nature of sound. Characteristics that are also well suited to Mary Jane Leach, one of the most important figures of post-minimalist American music. Tashi Wada, who was a student of Tenney, projects us into a different perspective on the relationship between sounds, regulated by uncommon proportions. In exploring this universe, Wada amazes us with sounds that stimulate rare emotions and produce complex and mysterious vibrations. Riccardo Nova delivered his soul to Indian culture and for many years he has made a choice of life, as well as artistic, that has modified his language, indianizing it. There is no slowness in this music, but a sense of time suspended and radicalized in micro-structures regulated by a superior mathematical law that dominates the piece like an obscure and silent omen only revealed at a closer look. Jürg Frey hypnotizes the listener with a series of imperturbable concentric loops, lost in their wanderings in an unknown dimension of time. The space between the sounds takes on particular importance, an almost architectural value that reveals an attention to positioning and emptiness worthy of a great Zen Master dealing with the setting up of a Japanese garden. Slowness is also one of the distinctive features of Laurence Crane’s poetics: Bobby J. is a clockwork device skillfully constructed to dig into our emotional sphere and lay bare our drives. On the same wavelength is Circulata Melodia by Giorgio Battistelli, an uncanny oasis of reflection and at the same time a wonderful example of the freezing of physical time. I have always considered Lithuania to be one of the most interesting countries to look at in my musical research, both for the richness of its cultural traditions and for the quality and level of extraordinary composers for such a small country. It is an asset/shelter, a magnet for my experiences, always ready to welcome me. Mater Lithuania. Justė Janulytė, Julius Aglinskas and Rytis Mažulis have found an original language that strucked me intimately, right from the beginning. Justė Janulyte’s visual poetics generates a representation that we could define as monochromatic, although the flow within it contains diffuse mobility, as a constantly changing sound spectrum rich in iridescent shades. Julius Aglinskas works on time with his particular technique of de-phasing, creating spectacular moving sound images. My friend Anton Lukoszevieze (who also had the merit of introducing me to his music) declared an interesting relationship between Julius’ work and the photography of Luigi Ghirri. A perfect comparison which brings together the ecstasy, beauty and melancholy common to the two artists. I feel great empathy with Rytis Mažulis’ music, as well as a long familiarity and an intense and wild collaboration. His perception of time is misleading: scales that repeat themselves incessantly invest us with micro-rhythms, displacements, windings, contractions and expansions. His music is a living organism. It pulses with life, it transmutes before our eyes, it surprises us with its pure presence. Gianni Gebbia is a versatile saxophonist and improviser who loves to delve into territories that do not belong to him directly. I asked him to search, with his curiositas, for a common mother tongue. The Sutartinės are simple canons, heart of Lithuanian musical culture. The peasants used to sing them in the villages of the north, on the border with Latvia, and the main purpose was to help weave social relations between the villagers. These canons could be performed with skudučiai, single-note flutes, and taking up this tradition, I elaborated some which I then sent to Gianni to inspire him to improvise with his usual vocabulary. Thanks to this experiment, we arrived to a shared result, confronting each other in unfamiliar territory and taking up an identity challenge, which is the main purpose of this sound journey. At the end of the journey I discovered a record by Stefano Pilia (Spiralis Aurea- Die Schachtel 2020) that made me jump: I couldn’t resist the temptation to include in this record two of his wonderful songs of solitude that seemed particularly suitable for discovering a hidden dimension of time. 

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M.Z. 9/11/2022