Zoomachia Disc 1 by Francesco Cavaliere
Dischi Fantom is happy to announce its fourth release, Zoomachia Disc 1, a musical fable written, composed, and performed by Francesco Cavaliere
First emerging during the mid 2000s in the field of experimental electronics, the Italian born, Berlin based artist, Francesco Cavaliere captivated us back in 2021 with ‘Viridescens’, his brilliant duo with Tomoko Sauvage issued by Marionette. With a handful of noteworthy releases having appeared since, he now returns with ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’, a remarkable fable bridging the territories of spoken word and electronic and electroacoustic composition.
For the better part of the last 20 years, Cavaliere has woven intimate tapestries of sound from a strikingly singular pallet of processed source material that have resulted in startling abstractions. It is this departure point that underscores ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’, a radically new way of working in the artist’s output. A musical fable written, composed, and performed by Cavaliere, the tale unfolds in two acts – ‘Il grillo ventriloquo incontra Setha la mantide’ (The ventriloquist cricket meets Setha the mantis) and ‘Atta e Volma nel regno delle api di vetro Ossax’ (Atta and Volma in the Ossax realm of glass worker bees) encountering a range of insect character in various guises: a cricket, spider, and numerous mantis, ants, and bees.
Against the fable’s text, delivered by Cavaliere with an ever-present sense of drama, the composer unfurls wild and playful, almost hallucinatory electroacoustic interventions, pulsing patterns on synths, fractured ambiences, and fleeting rhythms and melodies, bumbling to surface like watery springs, before receding from view and returning again.
Strange and wonderful in the best possible of ways, infusing experimental music with the child like wonder, playfulness, and mystery that was often encountered within popular culture during the 1970s, but rarely since, Francesco Cavaliere’s ‘Zoomachia Disc 1’ is one of those rare creations that leaves you feeling more curious than when you began. This fantastic LP is issued by Dischi Fantom in a highly limited vinyl edition of 200 copies, accompanied by a very special booklet with Italian and English texts.
Dischi Fantom 04
Zoomachia Disc 1, Francesco Cavaliere
12” vinyl LP, 180 grams
Italian and English booklet
Edition of 200
Written, composed and performed by Francesco Cavaliere.
Produced, recorded and mixed by Francesco Cavaliere and Lorenzo Dal Ri in the latter’s studio, in Milan, between March 2020 and June 2021.
Master: Lorenzo Dal Ri.
Printing: Vinilificio, Bologna.
Cover image: Piero Percoco.
Design: Boiler, Milano.
Sussurra Luce logo: Didier Falzone.
Publicist: Maria Orciuoli.
English translation: Jamie Richards.
Dischi Fantom would like to thank Lorenzo Dal Ri, Fabio Carboni, Triennale Milano Teatro, Radio Raheem.
Tracklist
Side A:
Il grillo ventriloquo incontra Setha la mantide
Side B:
Atta e Volma nel regno delle api di vetro Ossax
FRANCESCO CAVALIERE
Francesco Cavaliere is a visual artist, writer and sound maker born in Tuscany, Italy, in 1980. He lives and works between Berlin and Turin. His works are capable of enlivening his listeners’ inner states through a polymorphic activity that combines writing, sound, voice, drawing, sculpture, which together stimulate the imagination, undertaking long journeys crossed by ephemeral presences. He writes sound stories and music based on particles of sound, noise and language, often integrated with installation and scenographic elements or live performance, showing a particular taste for the most diverse forms of exoticism. Over the years he has developed a veritable dictionary to catalogue the metamorphic beings that inhabit his own abstract fantasy universe: hybrids of objects, animals, plants, planets, trails, cosmic objects and physical and perceptual phenomena generated by glass, minerals and voices, recorded and performed with analog technologies. “I am a talking scribe … my voice is a cloud, my pen hisses.”
francescocavaliere.bandcamp.com