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PREORDER
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ARTIST
TITLE
The Artistic Image is Always a Miracle
FORMAT
LP
LABEL
CATALOG #
ZEIT 018LP
ZEIT 018LP
GENRE
RELEASE DATE
9/27/2024
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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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