Excellent avant-percussion / tape record from the duo Valentina Magaletti and Pino Montecalvo, performing as Avvitagalli.
Their None Corsa (HORN OF PLENTY hop10) record spins at 45RPM and is neatly divided into two acts; on the “table” side, we have nine elegant miniatures, astonishing short instrumentals, each one distinct and occupying its own sound world. Percussion, piano, marimba, and keyboards create these tiny masterpieces, each embodying a certain strain of atmospheric mood or mysterious moment snap-shotted in time…they do this not by wallowing in the languors of ambient music, but with snappy and lively vignettes, fast-moving tunes, influenced as much by avant-pop, post-punk and dub mixing as they are by any form of recherché modernist composition. I see the music draws its inspiration from “a visit to an abandoned, torched palazzo somewhere in southern Europe” – this throwaway line in the press notes has sent me scurrying back to my collection of gazettes and atlases, in an attempt to find where this site might be located, but I suppose it’s unimportant. What’s significant is that our creators found artistic solace in this amazing ruin, whether it was medieval or renaissance, be it owned by Duke or Pontiff, whether burned 500 years ago or last week. Accordingly, there’s a tremendous number of ghosts on the Table side – what I would call ghosts – disembodied voices uttering uncanny phrases for no logical reason, or musical reason, and they appear on the tape at sublimely unexpected moments, chilling the marrow or warming the gizzard. There’s that same thrill as when that gullible Swedish pseudo-scientist Friedrich Jürgenson exhibited his tapes of voices speaking from the “other side” and claiming he had no idea how they appeared on the tape when there was nobody else in the area.
For Avvitagalli, these apparitions are an integral part of the Table suite, in places suggesting that the table might be part of a séance held in a darkened parlour in the 19th century. But we must still stress the inventiveness of these nine pieces is the real vote-winner at the end of the season, ingenious ideas flashing past like quicksilver, fleeting views of astonishing garden vistas, haggard faces appearing at the window before they vanish. Besides the semi-occult hints, one might also look for surrealist clues in the titles that refer to “sleep” more than once, the ideal of creative dreaming, the locus of true unfettered imaginative visions as endorsed by everyone from Magritte to Max Ernst and Paul Eluard. P.S. guest drummer Giovanni Todisco (from the duo Trrmà where he plays with synth player Giuseppe Candiano) appears on two tracks on this A side.
Flip over to the “Chair” side of this gorgeous artefact for a single piece, 15:32 of ‘The Last Shiny Bones of the Duno Ghost’. Besides making explicit reference to ghosts, confirming our suspicions from the Table side about this haunted palace, the music this time takes us even further into the dark realms of tape experimentation – garbled voices, slowed-down music, tape echo, and other wild manipulation. Eerie, disembodied, creepy…you bet! Enough spooked-out warped genius going down here to make the A side seem like jolly pop-music tunes from the age of surf music and beach blanket bingo. This extended suite allows us to see the ingenuity of Avvitagalli in action – one strongly senses it’s only partly-composed, the tape interventions and edits interlocking sharply with the base roots of drumming and percussive improvisation sessions. Nary a wasted moment in this 15-minute sojourn with the doomed ones…we encounter faces of new phantoms at every turn, floating through the grey zone. The economy and genius for compaction in music production reminds us very much of the last time we heard the amazing music of Valentina Magaletti, which was when she made Due Matte for this same label with Marlene Ribeiro, noted here in 2021. It was possible to “read” Due Matte as an extended essay on issues of feminism, patriarchy, and hysteria, and its conceptual unity was strong; on None Corsa, the subjects are more fleeting, the music more porous in places, but the same sharp instinct for tape assembly abides, delivering memorable performances and strange sounds.
As to Pino Montecalvo, this Italian player also runs the label Music A La Coque which brought us the wonderful record by Le Ton Mité in 2014, and a few other luminaries on its very select catalogue. He also plays in Lo Flopper and Bz Bz Ueu. Come to that, it might be his distorted voice we hear on this record imparting its fatal information in sonorous tones. Avvitagalli also made a short cassette for his label in 2021, which one would love to own. Today’s 12” vinyl release is issued with a book of photos by Adele Di Nunzio – these images, while adhering strongly to the “table and chair” theme in each tableau, also depict the expected fire damage and other destructive forces at play, and even the neat and tidy hotel rooms or domestic living room interiors carry a disturbing charge, mainly due to the murky grey shapes hovering outside the windows in menacing fashion. Each page illustrates one tune, no matter how brief it may be, with added poetic texts and high-impact typography – the book’s a work of art in itself. Another essential package from this visionary UK label! From 21 April 2022.
