Swiss composer Luigi Archetti is unheard in these pages, yet he’s been active since the 1990s and released many intriguing items on labels I tend to associated with the more severe and demanding end of our music, such as Domizil and Die Schachtel. He’s worked for years exploring the crossover between visual art and music, doing it in his own unique way. It’s one thing to lend your music as a kind of “soundtrack” to films or installations, as many do, but Archetti is I think aiming for a very integrated and holistic experience with the “aesthetic spaces” he builds, where video, drawing, painting and sound can work together, not without a certain amount of tension. His own limited LP editions may be by-products of all this, but they look both very challenging and very desirable with their minimalistic covers and heavy black abstract art.
Happy to receive a copy of Lava (KARLUK 001 CD), a double CD set, which he sent personally from his Zurich address; he not only composed it, but plays all the instruments, did the recording, sat in the producer’s seat, and even designed the cover. Right away with that simple but well-integrated cover design, with its careful placement of monochrome photos and strict no-nonsense typography, we get some sense of the way Archetti’s mind works. I have no frame of reference to how Lava sits with his other works, but I sense a determined intellectual force behind it. I think the music is made with guitars and possibly bass guitars (and maybe some light synth drone?), and mostly what we hear is short episodes (3 to 5 mins apiece) of highly concentrated near-crystalline sounds, events I can only describe as “shards”. You see how right away I’m clutching at lithoid metaphors…appropriate for the lava theme perhaps. But far from being fragmentary, the details and droplets of these very short guitar phrases and notes are evidently arranged with great deliberation, obliging the brain to start joining up the events in between many pauses and gasps of silence.
There’s also much to admire in the sound recording quality; not just that it’s vivid, sharp, and clear, but also that it’s approaching some kind of polished anonymity. Archetti might be aiming for some sort of “natural” surface feel to his music, or to represent the quality of the stone itself; he does speak of the “crystal lattice” in his notes, as if drawn to the structure of geological formations. Then again, I don’t think we’re expected to see the “lava” thing as much more than a metaphor, one which the composer intends to say something about “acoustic perceptions”, hinting that he’s trying to convey something about the way we apprehend music, or sound, or all art. Especially intriguing is the notion that it’s a very organic, living process; rather than dwelling on solidified solid lumps of volcanic rock, we should learn to look for a “fertile…eruptive imagination”. Above all, we keep coming back to the precision of the music, defined I would guess by his original conception as much as the careful execution, the performances, the recording…the “finest refinement” is what he offers us, part of it trying to get away from bogus sentiment and romantic spirit which might associate with more expressive conventional playing, such as when a classical violinist applies vibrato to elicit a sense of warmth or emotion. Archetti’s strings, and his composition, are as dry as you can get without actually visiting the Sudan or Peru, and his music is an entry point inviting us to go directly into the body of the stone.
Might I add that none of this strikes me as remotely “minimal”, or inspired by any schools of thought or performers that have adhered to minimalist strictures and rules; this Lava set may be slow, it may be restrained, it may be shorn of ornamentation, but the inner beauty and mysteries it conveys are very far from being minimal, and neither is it a formal exercise for its own sake. One might almost suggest it edges closer to a form of philosophy, an exercise in thought and contemplation. By all means investigate…arrived 21 January 2022.