Giovanni Antognozzi’s recording company ants (a new timeless sound) in Rome, Italy, has evolved into one of the most important diffusers of delicate, high-class sound art, much the same way Björn Nilsson’s recording company Content has done in Borås, Sweden. I’m writing simultaneously about releases from both those companies, just by chance, and I’m struck by how well this works for my sensitive perception. I can easily write one paragraph for ants and then, after a cup of coffee, another paragraph for Content – and I feel the same.

Yesterday I got some CDs in the mail. This happens most every day, and since I’m occupied with a new composition of my own plus a work as a criminal investigator, and also spend time with stage photography and writing poetry, I don’t have all the time I’d like for investigating each and every record that finds its way to me. Yesterday I went out on my racing bike for an exercise round after nightfall. I suppose people call me crazy for my daredevil rides through snow and darkness, but my reward is a fit body and a clear mind – and music never sounds as good as after a shower after a wintry bike ride! Anyhow, I felt tired, put on David Monacchi’s CD Paesaggi di Libero Ascolto and fell back into gravity in the utmost sense of auditory pleasure; a pleasure of both scientific and artistic properties. I experienced a sound art more delicate and innovative than anything I’d heard in years! I thought to myself: “This man is a genius!”.

I must confess that I’d felt somewhat apprehensive before I’d heard anything from this CD, because a few of the CDs that have come out of ants have been too simple, too… unrewarding, sporting automated rhythms and computer loops. That is below standards, and I always crave for the new touch, the different angle, the ingenious mind. I found all of that and much more in David Monacchi’s CD. It blows me away!

David Monacchi is a sound designer, composer and researcher in the field of sound recording and eco-acoustics. To put it simply, he makes field recordings all over the globe, and he runs the sounds through machinery. Many people excel in this trade, but very few reach the distinguished results of David Monacchi.

Monacchi has studied electronic music the Conservatory of Music in Pesaro, Italy, and he has also studied composition. Among his teachers we find names like Giordani, Sciarrino and Truax. He has taught Musical Communication, Sound Recording Techniques and Applied Sound Design at the University of Macerata, Italy.
He has worked for Greenpeace, collecting 3D sound samples in the Amazon.

All these credits aside, it is the personal creative act that interests me; that rare moment when a person is in true touch with his best qualities. How rare it is that a composer manages to get those rare moments down in the binary codes of a CD. David Monacchi managed that. This is the CD.

As I listened yesterday, on my bed after the bike ride in the Scandinavian midwinter darkness, I kind of drifted in and out of drowsy and semi-wake states, all the while traveling Monacchi’s soundscapes, freed of my body in my transitory mind state. I was amazed at the things I heard and saw. I got actual visions or perhaps dreams – live pictures in my mind – as I hovered inside this enchanted sound world, beginning inside a giant pump-station of Time.

The first dreamscape transformation I traveled was the piece La Selva degli Orologi; The Clock Forest for processed concrete sounds.
This was a journey from the microcosm of a lady’s wristwatch to a giant machine hall of turning cog-wheels – and all that has happened is an adjustment of perspective, from an overview to an inside-out perspective, a shift of dimensions; the tiny clockwork of a watch growing into a hall of time-killing machinery of the utmost disregard, the heaviest ruthlessness: time broken down into echoes of lives by relentless revolutions of giant wheels. Yes, David Monacchi draws me down into a diminutive state, lowering me down onto the floor of the watch-case, where I look in fright at the big wheels turning, casting their heavy shadows over the life of the earthling; a stranger in a strange land, a speck of organic matter in an automated time-forcer – and the minute-hand swishes by like a wing of a Don Quixote windmill in Spain or the rotor blade of a giant Sikorski in Vladivostok.

However, before the machine hall magnitude forces me to my knees under duress of Chronos, many things happen. This is where the delicacy of Monacchi’s art is reveled; how he takes the smallest sounds and juggles them around until he finds shadings and tendencies that you wouldn’t think would be there. He extracts and magnifies minuscule overtones and hardly audible echoes of pinions through state-of-the-art contact mikes, and he renders the sounds a soaring spatiality. He plays with volume as well as motion, and he never misses. He begins with the sound-as-is of watches, the way you might hear them if you put a wristwatch to your ear in a silent environment. What you will hear, not surprisingly, is the fast ticking of those pinions inside the watchcase. He introduces several kinds of watches, which all have their different sonic characteristics. I begin to think of the Dalai lama. Did you know that he is fascinated by clocks?
After a while Monacchi lets the ticking reveal more of its inherent pitch and tonal color. He doesn’t add anything superficial; he simply magnifies what is already there. Then he begins his illusory act by flying the sounds across the sound space like where they small metallic insects jetting past! I get the sense of a dangerous nano world of insect robots that are about to invade our anatomies!

The first movements of the miniature sounds move left to right or right to left, like simple passers-by in a dark landscape, like people hurrying by on a late, rainy fall night, holding there umbrellas; solitary individuals hurrying home through the wind and the rain without contact with each other.

A little later we experience slower, steadier ticks of clocks. Suddenly a slower tick reveals itself to actually be two separate ticks, as they slowly move out of phase with each other, causing new rhythms to appear.

These slow, out-of-phase pinion comrades come to a simultaneous halt, as a completely different atmosphere opens a large hall of distantly reverberating clocks, as if Monacchi put his ear very close to the surface of an ant mound, perceiving the endless rustling of tiny legs and antennae: myriads of chronometers on the move through the durations. It’s like listening to György Ligeti’s Poème Symphonique for 100 Metronomes in the breathtaking space of a huge cathedral: millions of termites eating away at the Heart of the World.

A few of these distant tickers move to the fore as the blurry cloud of nano pinions recede into the silence of timelessness. The newcomers tick at various speeds, and some are louder and more poignant than others. They move hither and thither, and I get the sensation of a crowded sidewalk, people passing by each other in a maze, albeit never bumping into each other.

A short while later the differentiation of clock sounds grow, so that you have old heavy seniors staggering by at a very slow space, while miniature Papillion dogs trip by with their little legs beating fast and light against the pavement.

Through a delicate application of reverberation, David Monacchi conjures subdued overtones out of the pinions, transforming the audio sphere into an enchanted mind sphere. Imperceptibly he shifts his focus from the material motions of pinions inside watchcases to the stirring electron clouds of burning thoughts through our cerebral cortexes; nerve-ends lighting up like sudden meteorites through the upper atmosphere; stinging realizations and trailing tracers of remorse…

This all comes to a surprising complete halt, the sounds brusquely cut off – and a dark space opens, unto which you can define no limits. It could be that you’re just a soaring mind in endless space, bodiless but completely alert. In that open darkness Monacchi lets well-articulated pinion tick-tocks pass by on spider legs; mechanical spiders speeding by in an extremely well spoken spatiality. This could be happening all the time, but you would never notice unless you’d be completely silent in a dark chamber; an anechoic chamber – and even then you’d be disturbed by the wheezing of your nervous system, the thumping of your pulse; the blood rushing though your veins. You don’t have to be John Cage to realize this. Monacchi etches these spidery pinion motions free of any worldly residue, leaving them free to be all that is, and in this pristine state of endless clarity they spider by your perception in nameless configurations.

If you want to retreat back to a more earthly realm, you might perceive this part of Monacchi’s work as nocturnal, the way François Bayle is nocturnal in Les Couleurs de la Nuit, or Bernard Parmegiani in Lumière Noire: a warm darkness with lots of insects. Yes, I get pictures inside my mind of insects passing in and out of the light from a campfire in Wyoming, while heavy mountain ranges rest in distant gravity.

The peculiar metallic haze around these entomologic motions in space lets on a slightly stranger aspect though; a stinging, razor-sharp solidity, out of which sounds grow denser, stronger: a steel entomology gamelan on the move!
I have to remind myself from time to time that these exciting soundings originate inside the watchcases of everyday wristwatches!

You realize that Monacchi is getting serious about this feat when you begin to hear an approaching hammering rhythm, like a distant sledgehammer with an aura of overtones drawing closer through the dark. You feel like you’ve been drawn into something that can only happen in the magic of a Christmas/Chanukah/Ramadan tale, when the small ones get big and the big one gets small, when Bush has to try out a bushman’s life in the Outback and an Aboriginal rules the world. This feeling dawns upon me as the tiny pinion suddenly approaches in the guise of a large cogwheel.

It’s like a distant threat/promise at first, and the shape of something large again recedes into the distance.

The banging echoes of something large reappear again, of course; this time at far right. It’s a looming largeness that has grown wildly out of the tiniest machinery. It comes closer, and even the glary cloud of overtones around it get loud and invasive and over-powering. The tiny, spidery swish-bys also pick up intensity and loudness. Soon the whole entourage of pinions and cog-wheels and unimaginable workshops lean down into a down-panning red shift, but even larger, monstrous cog-wheels, reaching to heaven, bear down into your world for a final demonstration of enchanted might.

Finally the monster machinery dissolves into its own misty reverberation, leaving only the slowed-down heart of the matter to beat sparsely on its way back to silence, in a universe where the stars have all died away and all that exists is non-existence – or perhaps silent, dark matter, turned away, always, at a 90-degree angle from everything that was…

The composer explains his methods in this matter-of-factly manner:

For La Selva degli Orologi (The Clock Forest) the following equipment was used:

The second work on David Monacchi’s CD Paesaggi di Libero Ascolto is Acqua; Water for concrete sounds.

The composer gives an introduction:

It is seldom that environmental field recordings do work in musical or sound art circumstances. It oftentimes becomes too obvious, too much a demonstration of a catalog of nature samples – but in rare cases the expression becomes tantalizing, palpably exciting and horrendously sensual. Mr. Monacchi succeeds. He seems to have this magic touch that is granted but the few.
The sounds of water are so well placed in the sound picture that I really feel that the left floor speaker at the bottom of my bead actually stands in a bucket of water!
Seems to me that part of the composer’s uncanny skill has to do with his spatial ingenuity and his expertise manipulation of spatial placement.

We all have tight relationships with water in the element’s various aspects, so making water music isn’t that hard. However, handling the recordings in the manner of Monacchi’s soaring aquatic poesis is a rare blessing.

I believe this is the first time that I’ve come to appreciate actual, well-defined nature sounds in electroacoustic composition without any reservations whatsoever. Whatever David Monacchi touches gains a property of enchantment and aural poetry.
Others have done extremely well in a more abstract way, like, say, Bernard Parmegiani in his Aquatisme – but here the sounds are readily available in their very natural states. Monacchi has seized a number of magic moments. This is both artistry and artisanship at the highest level.

Equipment used was

The third piece on Paesaggi di Libero Ascolto is Ciclo Circadiano; Circadian Cycle for sound environments.
It is a time compression of a 24 hour recording into 24 minutes, but not by speed-freaking, but by choosing suitable examples from the whole set of recordings, placed chronologically and simply cross-faded, without the use of multitrack overlapping or electronic processing.

Do I sense a purist here?

The recordings were made a spring day in the Italian Montefeltro Valley. One problem that Monacchi faced was the difficulty of getting longer stretches of audio without the disturbances of traffic, in the ground and in the air.

At the outset, this is not a far cry from the composer’s clock venture – but the small, insisting sounds here are those of crickets in the grass. It is beautiful, musical and structured, the crickets talking at you – or to themselves – from various directions. Into this meditative fabric a songbird cuts in high, shrill chirps, like a self-assured Picasso of the grove, talking in clear colors, in drastic curvatures, in thickly applied contours! Magnificent! A corncrake provides soaring, percussive textures deep in the fabric of sounds, and other birds join in, loud and multiple! The frogs by the pond croak madly, intensely.

It’s a wonderful planet that can paint in all these differentiated tonal colors across the day and the night of an earthly revolution.

David Monacchi really has this magic touch, this unparalleled faculty of presenting the world as music, carefully – but seemingly without effort – dodging the pitfalls of a naturalist’s catalog. Monacchi is Linnaeus turning Bach!

The Tawny owl’s exclamations sound as spooky as ever from inside the bowers of the parks. It likes living in close proximity of humans.

Monacchi’s orchestra is that of Italy’s nature in spring, and he plays it like Virgil Fox plays Bach; without prejudice, with open ears and a generous mind. It cannot be done better than this. I don’t even feel that there is a composer in between me and this resounding symphony of nature: I feel like I’m in the midst of this beauty; breathing, listening – and I feel healed! There is something very healthy and renewing about this music of the Earth.

I’d suggest that you listen through high-end earphones to this. When the bumblebees circle you, you’re bound to put up your hands to whisk them off! I have no sense at all of any technical mediator. I’m right out there – and therefore I even fool myself into feeling the air, smelling the fragrances and all that. My mind fills in where there in reality is nothing but sounds.

For these recordings Monacchi used

The last piece on the CD is Intorno all’Origine; Around the Origin for computer, concrete sounds and diaphonic chant. The chanter is David Monacchi himself.

The composer explains in minute detail what he has done in an essay in the booklet, but let me just quote a few remarks:

Read Monacchi’s whole text for a scientific explanation of this work.

For this elaborate recording the composer utilizes the following pieces of equipment:

At first, what you hear sounds like the beating of a metronome; a steady, un-pitched anonymous beat, like a click-track in a musician’s ear.
Very soon other layers are added, tonal layers with pitch and overtones, percussive beats as well as drones that shift and swivel, slowly building a dense and dark humus layer out of which the song Brother Jacob rises like colorful flowers as the dark drones become overwhelming like Lancaster bombers across the English Channel during World War II.

Intense bubbling chatter purls down the duration, adding yet another aspect.

This is without doubt the most – in a traditional sense – “musical” out of the works on the CD, as far as electro-acoustics go. I hear some references to John Chowning’s celebrated FM synthesis, so we’re talking computer generated sounds for the first time on this hard-line musique concrète CD!
Even in this role, David Monacchi accomplishes very interesting and enjoyable results! I haven’t heard of the man before this CD arrived in the mail, so I’m surprised, to say the least, in a very positive way!

I wonder what David Monacchi is doing now, because the most recent work on the CD is ten years old.

Crackling fire rises through the beautifully meandering drones. I can almost sense the acrimonious smell, but the fire dies down and David Monacchi’s voice enters the realm of drones, in a Dagar Brothers’ fashion of Southern India. In a jiffy, though, the singing turns into khoomei, i.e. Mongolian, Tibetan or Tuvinian overtone singing, commonly practiced in a professional way in the Western world by people like Stuart Hinds and Michael Vetter.

The CD ends in this Eastern, lofty air, somewhere in a Tibetan mountain pass, where the prayer streamers flap hard in the chilly wind and the colors blue, white and gold awaken the eye from soaring monasteries.

This CD will remain at the top of my stack för the next decades!