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ZEIT 018LP
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Furthering the passionate exploration of cinema that has guided her two previous LPs -- 2017's Fassbinder Wunderkammer and 2020's I Should Have Been a Gardener -- the Milanese guitarist/composer, Alessandra Novaga, returns to Die Schachtel with The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle, two sides of shimmering, tense compositions freely inspired by the life and work of the Russian director Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Classically trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland, over the last decade Alessandra Novaga has emerged as one of the leading figures within northern Italy's thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene. Remarkably ambitious and forward thinking, her approach to the guitar embarks upon a relentless deconstruction and rethinking of her instrument's unique properties through distinct applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating in a deeply personal and emotive music, seeking narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound. The seeds of The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle can be traced to a conversation that Novaga had with Alan Licht relating to the connections between music and cinema, which led her to consider Andrej Tarkovsky's use of Bach's music within a symbiotic framework: how the music illuminates the imagism of the films, and the film illuminates new dimensions of the music. Slowly developing over the subsequent years, the resulting album comprises six individual works, some of which draw directly upon pieces of Bach's music that Tarkovsky used in his films -- specifically "Erbarme dich, Mein Gott," "Das alte Jahr vergangen ist," and "Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ" -- while others draw upon the sensibilities and moods evoked in the imagination by the director's films. Encountering Novaga moving into fairly uncharted waters, three of the album's pieces incorporate the human voice, including that of the poet Arsenij Tarkovsky, the director's father. Roughly alternating between solo excursions on guitar and bristling electroacoustic pieces, over the course of the album's two sides Novaga weaves one of her most abstract and ambitious bodies of recordings to date, shifting between the complex tonal mediations generated by the six strings of her instrument, and phycological densities activated by the expanded pallet of sonority made possible by the tactics and approaches of musique concrète. The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle is available on as a limited edition of 300 dark turquoise vinyl LPs. The LP, designed by Bruno Stucchi/dinamomilano, comes with an eight-page insert illuminated by Alessandra's text as well as the lovely and intense photographs of Matilde Piazzi.
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ZEIT 016LP
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Offering a visionary approach to the solo guitar, Milanese experimentalist Alessandra Novaga, delivers an expansive meditation on the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman, with I Should Have Been a Gardener, presented by Die Schachtel. Alessandra Novaga is among the leading figures within Italy's thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, consistently rendering striking solo efforts, as well as equally noteworthy collaborating with Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, Elliott Sharp, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward-thinking, her approach to the guitar veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instrument's applications within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, encountering her relentlessly deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone. I Should Have Been a Gardener -- building on from the territory explored within 2017's Fassbinder Wunderkammer (2017) -- is Novaga's second LP to draw conceptually on her love for film. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration, the album takes form as a distillation, pulling from across the unique life, death, work, political commitment, and diaries of Derek Jarman. Emerging as an ethereal aural portrait of the man, sound -- interventions of tonality with non-instrumental sources -- and silence join in a single, unified body that seeks redemption and purification at the boundaries of life; an imprint that, like Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage, is magical -- flowers blooming between the stones -- hovering in the stark space between an endless sea and post-modern shadow of a nuclear power plant. As remarkably listenable as it is challenging and pregnant with ideas, Novaga's I Should Have Been a Gardener represents a strikingly at ease step forward in the potentialities of experimental music. Bravely taking on the ubiquitous expectations of the guitar, Novaga refused to relinquish the clarity of source and sound, forcing the ear to rethink what is accepted and known at every turn. An immersive journey from one of Italy's most important contemporary voices. 180 gram, yellow vinyl; accompanied by an extensive, exploratory booklet; Edition of 200.
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BLUME 004LP
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Alessandra Novaga delivers a stunning LP, a compelling investigation of her resonantly spacious guitar playing that dismantles the instrument's unique properties through relentlessness. Movimenti Lunari speaks of the relentlessness of natural forces. Something that seems to have no development, but instead advances inexorably. A form developing out of a memory progressively coming into focus; never still, constantly pulsating and vibrating with new elements. Beyond any rational, analytic thought, a sound that belongs to remembrance. Sandro Mussida's "In Memoria" questions this relationship between movement and stillness in the form of a piece of music. The piece is a meditation on memory, technology, and sound; the repeating theme recalls bells chiming over and over, drawn out into lines as long as the horizon. Francesco Gagliardi's "Untitled, January" speaks of a sound evoked by an image. A photograph. A foggy landscape seen from a train. Accompanied by a single instruction: "A drone, or drones. Any duration." Simultaneously timely and timeless, Movimenti Lunari has the feel of artistic invention, a canvas of delicacy melding into intense streams of sound. Includes obi strip.
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