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CD Feature/ Giancarlo Toniutti: "Sound-field for Rattle-Harp"

  Tobias

A sonic component, rather than foundation or reflection, of the art of Luisa Tomasetig, specifically - at least at first, though soon spilling well beyond - her exhibit which took place in Tolmin, Slovenia in the early months of 2002, sound artist Giancarlo Toniutti's second full-length, and first in some twenty years, so far as this reviewer can gleam from the inflated prose that fill the linear notes, deals with a sharing experience, more specifically, with rendering the duality of subject and object iridescent through unceasingly active inversions of linked micro-events that comprise a closed sound-universe.

Toniutti gives this work its own feel, for one, owing to his selection of instruments: predominantly, he employs a rattle-harp, which consists of an iron plate and long metal and string wires, which are played by a mongolian bow. After processing and mixing the results, in a curious move, Toniutti ensured the instrument would not take on a historical dimension, and instead remain a completely closed past, beholden to the singularity of this point in time as its unwitting outgrowth, by dismantling it at the end of the construction process.

Against the flux that ensues, which is individual in its pace and sensitivity to dynamics, the listener is indeed able to throw out one's own associations with ever-increasing ease. Over the course of its nearly one hour life-span, the work never comes to term, but instead turns in on itself as the loops ferment until the pressure is eased as the composition mutates in a subtle manner. Though it shifts in great, deep waves, it carefully pulls and pushes at itself without descending into inchoate sonic mire. Its crackling, churning mechanical movements, quartz-like detail and murky analogue delay, keep it in shape, and ensures it positively breaths space and a sort of ill-defined pathos. The work is thus enticing as a shifting architecture and inclosure for perception and imagination.

By Max Schaefer  

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