Dinzu Artefacts (US)
32’53”
Cat.No. DNZ36
Cassette + Digital
Edition of 80 
Released 15th January 2019

Liner Notes

Credits

Reviews

音で表現する「不安」や「ためらい」の感情。慣れ親しんだ楽器やツールを遠ざけ、周到な準備や計算を敢えて排除することによって自らをその感情に近付ける。イタリアのアーティストFabio Perlettaが試みる芸術表現。余白の中に点在する木製の音や、逆に空間を埋め尽くすような金属音。音がもつ「そのままの形」が人間の感情と結び付いていることを示す「悟り」の世界。結果として、非常に高尚な物音系サウンドアート作品として成立している。

Waltz Cassette Store, Tokyo

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Much of Fabio Perletta’s previous work (released on Line and Farmacia901) has explicitly foregrounded his interest in Japanese aesthetics, even utilizing field-recordings made while traveling in Japan. Hesitant instead found inspiration from a meeting with steve roden in his Pasadena home. While Perletta was based in Los Angeles for a residency organized by VOLUME in June of 2017 (the culminating performance of which was released by Dragon’s Eye in 2018), he encountered roden at a point in which he had jettisoned the gear he had used for decades, adopting a modular synth rig in order to de-familiarize his creative approach and avoid stagnant repetition. It’s not at all a surprise to find roden’s approach resonating with Perletta, but perhaps roden’s openness to failure and risk freed Perletta from any anxiety concerning this material. He draws on an archive of sound sources he had prepared for various events, but rather than force them into an overwrought configuration, Hesistant‘s 16 short tracks form “an attempt to present sound as it is, not attached to anything but itself, yet far away from being a document or a representation of something.” There is much silence in each track, with often quite loud staccato bursts of activity, the result being a time-based exploration of negative space. Minimal and hypnotic, with the attention to subtle detail we’ve come to expect from one of Italy’s premiere purveyors of microsound. 

Joe Sannicandro, A Closer Listen

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Italian sound artist Fabio Perletta takes his fascination with minimalism to Zen-like levels on this new release. His love of Japanese aesthetics has been displayed on previous works, most notably his album Ichinen 一念, on the LINE label from 2017. That release took much of its source sounds from field recordings made at various shrines in Japan. On Hesitant, the sounds were originally used on another Japanese tour, and these pieces have metamorphosed from live works to material remoulded for this cassette release.

Consisting of 16 short, untitled tracks, each one focuses into a few particular sounds, zooming into them with a microscopic precision. untitled # 1 is made up of simple, single hits with a little splash of reverb. The spaces between the hits are occasionally interrupted by squeaking found sounds that are difficult to identify their origin. untitled # 2 includes little washes of white noise, and scrapes, punctuated by gaps of silence.

untitled # 4 is the first track to feature synthetic sounds, as a delicate sine wave travels through the stereo field as more tactile sounds come and go. untitled # 6 sounds like it could be rainfall or static, but after a while the listener realizes not to worry about the source of these sounds, and just enjoy them for their own sake. This Zen notion of letting go and placing yourself in the moment is an important one while listening to Perletta’s new work. These are sounds that simply exist in their own little world.

untitled # 7 is a little more restless, the movement back and forth a stark contrast to the sounds preceding. Woody and hollow, the sounds loop and overlap constantly. untitled # 11 brings the computer processing to the fore, although most of this material has been processed to a certain degree, it’s here that it pokes through more noticeably. untitled # 14 is a simple buzzing drone that pans left and right, with ever so slight sounds resembling gongs join the flow.

The final track, untitled # 16 is the most minimal piece of the collection, made of sparse clicks and low frequency pops, with little shimmers of reverb and those hints at gongs again. When the track ends and silence takes over, it’s tempting to listen to the sounds of your room, the tones of your environment, and relate them to the small sounds that came before. With “Hesitant”, Fabio Perletta has constructed a quiet masterwork of restraint, presenting his sounds to be listened to as they are, attaching nothing to them except your attention.

Darren McClure, Toneshift

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Ritrovare la purezza del suono, eliminare sovrastrutture e processi compositivi fino a giungere alla scarna risonanza da affidare all’immaginazione di chi la accoglie. È molto più di un semplice moto di sottrazione quello attuato da Fabio Perletta in “Hesitant”, è un’indagine che mira a recuperare un’autonomia della materia per lasciarle sprigionare l’intrinseca forza ancora non veicolata da un’intenzione necessariamente imposta.

Ognuno dei sedici capitoli, che si susseguono privi di forma e denominazione, rappresenta così un evocativo nucleo primigenio dal quale trarre possibili tracciati da sviluppare in piena libertà, senza porsi limiti dettati da un’origine chiara o da una scansione delineata. Risulta così pienamente funzionale all’intento la scelta di ridurre a frammenti spesso brevissimi gli input estrapolati e lasciati decantare fino ad assumere un volontario anonimato.

Ribaltando l’indirizzo di un’epoca fortemente contraddistinta dalla perentorietà del gesto artistico, l’esplorazione condotta da Perletta tenta di recuperare nuova linfa vitale attraverso un processo che vede l’autore relegato al ruolo di ricercatore di incontaminate potenzialità in divenire.

Peppe Trotta, So What

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Dinzu Artifacts’ first batch of 2019 exists comfortably in the label’s signature style. Both Ife and Hesitant sit on the edge of what most would term music, veering further into expository sound collage work. Of the two tapes, Ife is the more approachable, especially as the thudding sounds in the final two tracks build toward a nearly danceable rhythm. Hesitant is less forgiving, with Perletta cycling through 16 short movements of sparsely arranged percussive noises. Whatever the meaning behind the abstraction, the three artists showcased here assert themselves as practiced and purposeful constructors of atypical sound worlds.

Slug Mag