The label’s introductory text:

“Luca Miti in his works tends to put himself in relation to the sound, searching for the interaction between sound and environment, and – more important – between the capability to produce a sound and to receive it. Some “theatre” music – raw excerpts of sparse, subtle electronic sounds (for “E non mi resta che tornare solo”). The audio component of the “sound installation” – “Mens Conclusa” – a loop with scratching and clicking sounds and mutant voices. The electronic interaction between two performers (Miti himself and his long time friend Francesco Michi) in the long “Giocattoli” (“Toys”) – a sparse sound ambient due to the use of small, low-fi live electronics and “anachronistic” electronic sounds. The sound flux (again from Michi and Miti) that de-sign the time-space of specific place, in “II° Progetto per la regolamentazione e l’ordinamento dei flussi estetici per la comunità di Topolò 2001”. And then, to close, the soundtrack for another theatrical piece; “Immaginate la notte”, modeled on Massenet and pregnant with a lyrical atmosphere that finally flows in a tonal ending for accordion; an amusing counterpart for a work that well represent, even if in a fragmented way, the sounding universe of the author.”

The ambience of some unknown – distant, but not frightening – urban environment surrounds you, as a recurrent, unidentified tone – bluish, violet – moves in and out of view like a flickering corner shade in a painting by one of the impressionists. Sudden laughter hits hard, insanely. A voice talking in Italian is heard in a muffled, behind-the-car-wreck type of way, and a distant city (?) murmur is detected. Then it suddenly halts, stops… silence! …and starts again, but now with a tone that takes on the guise of microphone overload smearing the whole sounding space. The voice returns, and the city murmur too.

This is like eavesdropping on an environment which wasn’t supposed to be heard, like hearing the old Greeks by turning pottery around, listening with a tree stick poked into the revolving surface (like som enthusiasts thought they possibly could). There’s as much human soul and tragedy in this dusty, sunny recording as in Björk’s latest moraine- and glacier anxiety (“Aurora” from “Vespertine”), and the human predicament is stripped bare, reduced to this spot of shade in the corner of the yard, where someone is upset, while the bus passes outside on the street and the dust is filling the mouths of the pedestrians who have not withdrawn to shady coffee shops.

The poetry in this recording – “E non mi resta che tornare solo” – is the desolate, barren, dusty, sunny loneliness in the anonymous crowd that you find in the sunniest books of J. M. G. Le Clèzio, and on some of the most earnest pages of Graham Greene. It is a poetic sound environment where a glass of water is the most precious thing thinkable, and where the act of loving is just a rose in a broken glass on a rusty table, while the pidgins suffocate in the heat of the city. It’s a fading black-and-white snapshot from distant decades when suicide was the most forbidden of acts. The occurrence of xöömej (khoomei) overtone singing is a feverish dream that ends in violent applause, like cubes of ice falling over your head in the merciless heat. Wonderful!

“Mens Conclusa” sports voices barely audible through the heavy static of static, but the words heard between the occasional laughter are indeed the words of the title. It feels like you’re rolled up in the trunk of a car, listening to the mad guys that put you there, who are standing behind the car, uttering – in a mad repetitious, but also variational - manner, the words “mens conclusa”. In that case the static could well be the sound of the engine of the car, idling just outside town, while the guys attach a hose to the exhaust pipe, leading the deadly fumes into the trunk, which probably means that the words “mens conclusa” will be the last words you hear in this life – but not to worry; millions of lives are in the store for you, and nothing really ends…except there’s a little problem with that: you never seem to remember the lives that passed… Read your Bardo Thödol! “Mens Conclusa”!

“Ommagio a Saverio Ungheri” is exactly one minute of something that got stuck and keeps repeating itself on a backdrop of rain trickling from a drainpipe or from a roof down onto the stone-laden sidewalk or onto the yard of a hidden square – or is it the loop of someone’s depressive thoughts (smeared with feelings of guilt and remorse) that keeps him in that gloomy state of mind? A muffled (by walls, by houses?) car passes half way into the short piece, placing it in a reasonably recent timeframe. When 14 seconds remain someone sighs and says: “That’s it!”, immediately followed by applause! - not many are present, which you can deduct from the claps. Completely absurd, and very wonderful!

“Giocattoli”, on the other hand, is a long piece, with its almost 22 minutes. However, I find that our common perception of time, which we use to catch the train or show up at work, isn’t applicable at all in these recordings. This CD is a series of frames snatched out of the flow of existence, transferred to a dimension of austere, lofty timelessness. If a second or two hours; it wouldn’t matter. It is as if some passages of one of my travels across the Adriatic Sea from Venezia to Haifa in 1967, in my hippie kibbutz teens, aboard M/S Messapia, would appear in a dreamy state on a painting in a museum in Brindisi, as the warm breeze moves the long leaves of the palm trees outside in the park by the marble fountain. It’s magic, it’s the prying loose of fragments out of the flow of life and time, and it gives a kind of consolation to me in this daily hearing I have with myself about the purpose of my existence and life under these certain circumstances that I find myself in this day, hour, minute, second; the result of the Karma quality of the layers of life…
“Giocattoli” means “toys”. There is a room reverberation apparent here, in which footsteps and mumbling voices are heard, and in this wide space something appears to be waiting, slowly taking shape, actually happening – while people cough and breath, as if caught by an eavesdropping microphone that nobody is aware of, maybe even left on and forgotten by the owner of the tape recorder, until the tape ran out, later scrutinized by the returning tape recorder owner… but this is denied, in fact, when the first definite “art sounds” appear at 3:46 into the piece, in a Cageian or post-Cageian way, assuring us that this indeed is a sound installation piece, or possibly an improvised, lo-fi walkman recording of such an occasion, or a live electronic performance… but in these cases, in these kinds of recordings, the unforeseen events are always the most interesting, like the sounds of cars mixing with the “art sounds”, or the sounds of the attendants (who might be just passers-by stepping into the shade of the hall by sheer impulsive curiosity, or simply seeking temporary refuge from the sun) who step through the hall in their dusty street shoes, mumbling and showering the hall with sweeping and controlling glances, keeping their children under tight scrutiny.
It might actually be more accurate to state that the “art sounds” (the sounds emitted by lo-fi electronic devices, put in the listening space by Francesco Michi and Luca Miti – and maybe played by them) in fact are mixing with the everyday sounds (which are the real, day-to-day chance operation art sounds of life), just rendering those sounding commonplace chance operations of existence another aspect, another nuance, making possible a junction between the foreseen and the unforeseen, shaping an instantaneous, short-lived balancing act of the utmost delicacy, bound to disintegrate maybe before anyone even noticed…
It is true meditation to lie back and listen to this piece through headphones!

“II° Progetto per la regolamentazione e l’ordinamento dei flussi estetici per la comunità di Topolò 2001” cuts up the flow of existential buoyancy in a more brutal fashion, in a sound that may well be the result of a slowed down recording of a moped or a chainsaw… but in my mind a horizon full of tin cans appear, because this is the language of tin cans, the way they sound when communicating in desperation on a long-haul inside a big 18-wheeler along the highways of Europe, to their dispersement in the diaspora of HIT supermarkets in Kürten near Bergische Gladbach outside Cologne, and RIMI stores in Kiruna, Lapland. As abruptly as this tin can conversation in cross-European haulers started, it stops. Suddenly! Silence of the tin cans! All across Europe; this silence of the cans!

The last piece is “Immaginate la notte”, divided onto the concluding tracks 6 and 7. The beginning is gentle, dreamy, distant, as on Gilius van Berkeijk’s masterly conceived “Over de Dood en de Tijd” (which is an homage to Franz Schubert and his “Der Tod und das Mädchen”). A repetitious introverted organ passage (modeled on Massenet) inside the commotion of the distortion and hiss provides the modal quality of this brutal wall of sound; the long lost soul of fallen divine spirits in the overwhelming roar of evil, where the undeserved wonders of a the Almighty is the only hope to cling to – for us all! The distant organ sound is like a reflection of the glow of the goodness of the heavenly pastures angled down by the Angel of the Last Hope to the languishing crew of an ocean liner breaking up in an Atlantic hurricane.

The second part of “Immaginate la notte” – the very last track; no 7 – holds the same kinds of feelings and vision as the first version, and even more lofty beauty, with a swaying, bulging piano providing the melancholy of the melody with sparse fingerings. Laura Marchetti’s voice renders the piece an even more austere, otherworldly atmosphere of hereafter and beyond communicating by sheer emotion with the living souls. A “Ligeti organ” takes over from the watery piano, and Luca Miti’s voice grunts loudly, like a cartoon figure in a 1950’s cowboy series: “Aaah!”. An accordion finally takes hold, and with a few minutes of a staccato-pride accordion melody this magnificent, dreamy CD with unforeseen, spontaneous glimpses out of human existence ends. Magnificent!