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2LP
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ZEIT 017LP
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First emerging during the early 2000s, over the past two decades -- via solo releases and numerous collaborations with artists like Oren Ambarchi, Valerio Tricoli, Alessandra Novaga, and numerous others -- Stefano Pilia has presented a singular voice within Italian experimental music. Spiralis Aurea, his third solo release with Die Schachtel, encounters the composer venturing into unchartered waters, exploring notions of spirituality via a body of twelve compositions, recorded in various combinations with a cast of all-star instrumentalists; Alessandra Novaga, iosonouncane, Silvia Tarozzi, Mattia Cipolli, Ensemble Concordanze, Elisa Bognetti, Enrico Gabrielli, Valeria Sturba, Giuseppe Franchellucci, Adrian Utley, and Cecilia Stacchiotti. The roots of Spiralis Aurea rest within Pilia's longstanding, personal engagement with the spiritual and an epiphany had during a visit to the Futa Pass cemetery, the resting place for German soldiers killed in Italy during the Second World War. Stepping back from the intuitive immediacy that guided his work for decades, and inspired by the concepts of "divine geometry", he set out to translate a series of numerical relationships and geometric figures into "sacred" musical forms. Drawing its title from the Golden Spiral, a mathematical formula and geometric form that has maintained both mystical and creative significance for millennia, each of the 12 works that comprise Spiralis Aurea began with a figure or process that is both geometric and symbolic, drawn by Pilia, that slowly translated into tangible organizations of sound. In some cases, such as the three movements of the "CodeXIII" series and "Crux", this process transformed numerical relationships derived from the Fibonacci sequence -- the underpinning of the "Golden Spiral" -- into harmonic progressions, while others take on more iconic and culturally familiar forms. "Ouroboros" alludes to an ancient symbol of a serpent consuming its own tail, deploying a contrapuntal process within which the beginning and end coincide. "Hannah", on the other hand -- deriving from the Hebrew word for "grace" -- is slightly more abstract, doubling its literal meaning against the palindromic qualities of the word, both aspects being reflected within the structural symmetry of the score. Pilia's Spiralis Aurea culminates as a series of sonic meditations, leaving room within their spacious forms to encourage active listening. Calling up echoes of ancient musics within their optimistic, forward-thinking tones, across various arrangements of instrumentation, Pilia sculpts a striking intersection between acoustic and electroacoustic process, drone, and chamber music. 180 gram vinyl; six-panel gatefold cover; includes booklet; edition of 190.
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LP
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DECAY 002LP
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Milan based Die Schachtel presents In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (We Turn Round In The Night And, Behold, We Are Consumed By Fire), a work for solo guitar by the Italian composer Stefano Pilia. This marks the second release on a new series on Die Schachtel's imprint, Decay Music. Born in Genoa and based in Bologna, Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer concerned with the sculptural properties of sound, offering particular focus to its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time -- the conceptual undercurrent of In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. Comprised of corresponding compositional triptychs on each of its two sides, the final act of both featuring contributions from experimental music heavyweights, Rodrigo D'Erasmo on violin and David Grubbs on piano, the album builds vast, inhabitable expanses of ambience from long tones and shattered cuts and collisions, punctuated by clusters, sweeps, and careful interventions of texture and note. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni -- as this eerie palindrome and endecasillabo (a syntactic form in classical Italian verse) from Virgil suggests -- moves through a path of alchemical symbolic narratives and poetic abstraction humbly reminiscent and allegorically inspired by Dante's Divine Comedy and by the Nekyia ("evocation of the dead") parts found in Book IX of Homer's Odyssey. Based on symmetrical harmonic, melodic and narrative properties and filled with intangible narrative, haunting abstraction, fleeting visions of eerie space, and slow-motion melody, Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni pushes electroacoustic music toward symphonic dimensions -- dramatic arcs with echoes of high minimalism, historic ambient music, and the radicalism indeterminate forms. Through a wise, peculiar and abstracted use of guitar instrumentation, the sound surface of the compositions reaches deeper electroacoustic-symphonic dimensions, echoing minimalist works, ambient music and indeterminate contemporary forms. Pro-printed inner sleeve and jacket, containing a silkscreened PVC sleeve. 180 gram marble vinyl; Edition of 250, one-time pressing.
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CD
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SED 045CD
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"The Suncrows Fall and Tree bolsters Stefano Pilia's small but substantial and well received body of solo work (LVD, Time-Lag) along with his participation in the highly lauded 3/4HadBeenEliminated project with Valerio Tricoli and Claudio Rocchetti. The new document contains two 20-minute long sound arcs that are sweeping and focused, essentially drone pieces. They are beautiful in their restraint but not 'pretty' and are grounded in the subtle use of acoustic and natural sound elements. The work was composed and recorded between 2003 and 2005 in Bologna, Milano, Codroipo and Arbatax using the following sound sources and devices: electric guitar, field recordings, microphones, piano, tape noise, instruments played by wind, sine waves, PVC tubes, filters with an additional contribution from Andrea Belfi of high frequency synth. Besides the above mentioned projects, Pilia is also a member of the Medves project and a collaborator with Black Forest/Black Sea and has contributed to numerous installation and film sound works."
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CD
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ZEIT 007CD
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"This solo work by the 3/4hadbeeneliminated guitarist Stefano Pilia can rightly be defined 'ecstatic,' in the purest sense of the term. Each guitar note seems to emanate from beneath an invisible surface, lingering for a few moments only to drop back down and be replaced by another; different harmonics emerge creating a restless resonance, and tiny clusters of melody appear and disappear before fading in the haze of a gorgeous drone."
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