Italian-based sound artist Emanuele Magni focuses his research on contemporary soundscape. After beginning field recording activity, he has been looking for places in his region located in North-Italy “not contaminated with anthropophonic sounds”, finding out that “in a world where planes are the worst nightmare for a naturalist field recordist, to get to most of these places [he needs] to take a plane”. After being conscious of this, he decided to continue to record in his territory, questioning his anti-anthropophonic integrity and becaming aware that even his city and its surroundings can provide infinite sound material sources.
As twenty-third release of the Galaverna catalogue, “Piàn di Resnèi” is an album based on field recordings taken in Pian dei Resinelli – Lecco (Piàn di Resnèi in local dialect), a plateau at an average elevation of about 1200 metres, in february 2017. The place, once a sky slope, now has become a bob slope for children.
It’s a mesmerizing voyage of about 28 minutes into interstices between human and non-human acoustic environment, appearing as an intense and delicate composition, a charming composition suspended between different elegiac and concrete spaces that asks the listener for making experience of a complex and fragile environment and delving into the tenuous coexistence of diverse sounds into an highly evocative and border soundscape.
Note from a the artist It was one of the last days with snow on the ground, just before the first symptoms of spring: you can hear it from the sound of the snow. Luckily it was not a week-end day, so no crowd in the place and this translated in a balanced soundscape, congruent with the concept of the Acoustic Niche Hypothesis (Bernie Krause), the idea that vocal organisms in a healthy habitat, tend to establish acoustic or temporal bandwidth in which to vocalize unimpeded by the signatures of others.
The field recording is pure, meaning there is no audio treatment except a bit of equalization and compression for mastering reasons.
Piàn di Resnèi by Emanuele Magni is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Permissions beyond the scope of this license may be available at www.galaverna.org.