polline – vital weekly 1018

The credits for instruments on this cassette are ‘microfoni, oggetti, effetti’, which translates as ‘microphones, objects and effects’. We know Favaron from his various collaborative works, with Corrado Altieri, Stefano Gentile, Deison, or groups as Lasik Surgery, Maribor, Under The Snow and Zbeen and some of his solo works. Most of his music is released by Silentes. I am not sure how his set-up works; also I am not sure if I ever gave it much thought. I did today, listening to this new tape. Here we have all sorts of sounds, of objects-on-objects, amplified and played through a mixing board changing the colour of sound through equalisation. The mixing board, so I assume, is also used to add distorted drone like sound; mildly distorted that is. I would think Favaron uses a multi-track recorder and records a whole bunch of sounds in a more or less random fashion on tape and then later on starts to mix these together, using vari-speed on both the recording and the playback. This means he has access to many ways to mix his music and make it all very collage-like. Sometimes he stays in one place for a bit, and one recognizes some of the sounds, altogether forming a piece inside a piece before one element stays one and which becomes the next segment of the piece. It all sounds rather vague (which is not necessarily quiet), and perhaps also like a personal statement of musique concrete. And if you think that listening isn’t enough, I’d recommend putting this cassette into your four-track recorder and doing your own mix; that would be interesting as well. (FdW)