Termite is a study in decay for baritone saxophone and tape.

The real sounds, human and concrete, secretly recorded with tiny earplug microphones at social events, concerts, hospitals and nights out, are left to rot without any care for display. Transformed into a new ecosystem, hosting saprophytic creatures yearning for a new life of scavenging.

The organic and random swarm of micro-events attacks the sound material, fleshing it out, revealing new forms in which, if we look carefully, we can still see the spoils of the original elements.

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Create This Book is a remix.

While making this piece for the Italian pianist Luca Sguera I wrote: "I made every effort to slow this piece down, to use all the muscles of my body, to nail it to the ground, like when you try to kill a snake, or when you try to understand the folds of your daily life and put them in order. What I have done with these materials are the most exhaustive photographs of my indecision."

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Samenreis is the result of research carried out in Italy and the Netherlands on the relationship between sound, environment and participation.

The content of this record was produced entirely in the anechoic chamber of the HKU in Utrecht and is imbued with perfectly artificial, sometimes dystopian qualities that allow the composition of virtual listening spaces, finely detailed and hyper-digital.

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È breve il tempo che resta.
Poisaremo scie luminosissime.
E quanta nostalgia avremodell’umano.
Come ora neabbiamo dell’infinità.

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The sounds I used in this piece belong to a personal field recording project I did in Basilicata during a long visit in the summer of 2017.

During the weeks I spent there, I mainly explored the inland areas, the mountains, the villages of Val Sinni and the surroundings of Aliano. During the day, the heat would not let anyone out and everything was so quiet that any small noise was deafening.

Non ci sono gesti, quaggiù, né l’amabile retorica della natura generante o del lavoro umano. Soltanto una distesa uniforme di terra abbandonata, e in alto, il paese bianco.

There are no gestures down here, no beautiful rhetoric about nature and human work. Just a monotonous line of abandoned land, and up there, white houses.
(C. Levi)

My challenge in this situation was to look for life. Human activity was only to be found in small groups of men playing cards in the bars, or in the church with its bells and muted litanies. Inside the houses, the televisions acted as virtual windows onto a country that functions at a different speed.

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This piece went through a process of internalisation, which happened through accumulation and layering. I composed and dismantled, I asked for advice, I mixed in different studios, I extended and erased. I borrowed material from other composers and made it a collaborative piece, only to reclaim it for myself because it was just too personal, something that took years.

I don't know who is in the piece. I ignore what came first, who it is dedicated to or what I am talking about. The settling of emotional sediments, layered day by day, year by year, blurred the perception of time and became eternity. Everything here is present and already past. When we fade and hold hands with someone new, we barely exist and matter less than nothing.

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I Immaterialize

And Slowly Drift

Into the Unknown

IIn Verso Stelle Mai Viste, time unfolds before my eyes like a map of my personal history, as if everything happened in the same moment.

Lungo sarà, se tutte in verso ordisco

le cose che gli fur quivi dimostre;

che dopo mille e mille io non finisco,

e vi son tutte l'occurrenze nostre:

When I consult my sonic orbuculum, specific recording accidents, such as the children singing on the frozen lake or the docks at night with my friend Harriet, appear embedded in a landscape of synthetic and orchestral sounds that find an aleatory organisation. The material is a group of soloists rather than a randomly interacting ensemble.

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Time is a texture, a rhizomatic crumbling of chaotic micro-events, all with their own logical reasons and consequences, composing a self-regulating, hyper-accelerated stasis, countless things moving at different speeds. In this we imagine a linear vector, a total organic - almost biological - acceleration > evolution >> development >>> growth!

To be fair, in this polar inertia everything moves but nothing really changes.

All I wanted was a place to hide, a safe niche, a little shelter where I could keep all my little treasures. I wanted to slow down, to put on the brakes, to seek the comfort of a friend, to do something stupid. So I took the sirens of work, the impulses of urgency, and turned them into a velvety sweet marmalade of sound, warm and wet and sticky like my mother's womb (or the intestines of a dugong): a numbingly delicious jelly in which to swim, love, stretch and sleep.

This piece is born from the ashes of a piece I composed earlier, in a rush, and I hated it. I tore it apart, left it to rot and waited for new life to emerge. When I exhumed this mess, there were children born by chance, flowers growing in a pile of dung.