Scanner
Sound for Spaces

The question posed by the title of the work "What are the spaces to fill?" could have a dual answer.

First: the cultured music or presumed as such (let's admit for a moment that a boundary between "cultured" and "extra-cultured" existed) is characterized by (and derives significance from) a margin (a space, indeed) "filled up" by a more extensively meta-musical discourse. This applies across the board to Eno, Satie, Dopplereffekt, Orbital, Richard David James, and everything that reconnects one's experience to previous experiences, bypassing (more or less) "rock" in a broad sense, configuring the implicit ambition of a "surpassing" of historically (also) cultural barriers.

Second: the spaces to fill are exactly those that fill these sounds: a basic explanation as is, after all, the concept at the base of this project. Scanner is the pseudonym of the art creator behind this album, which in the strict sense isn't an album, gathering tracks, pieces, and entire pieces of previous works dating back to 1984 (the record was reissued in 2003). It is then a multimedia artist, versatile, who for at least two decades has been designing and setting up multimedia/multimodal installations, in which (beyond very modern and advanced ideas like the conception of music in an "architectural" sense and part of a multisensory experience), we can pinpoint the core of creative development in the idea precisely of "scanning", understood as "exploration", "interception" of sounds, noises, conversations retrievable in the ether or capturable by other media.

Let two iconic images serve as examples: the memorable beginning of "Contact" by Robert Zemeckis (astrophysics understood as an extremely refined form of intercepting the "cosmic junk" made of hums, noises, and echoes from largely useless transmissions) and the equally historic TV program "Fuori Orario: Cose (mai) viste" conceived by Enrico Ghezzi, based on the same idea of capturing and reproducing fragments, or rather "splinters" of other TV programs otherwise nearly impossible to see.

The focus of the "Scanner" project thus seems shifted compared to that of the "Copernican revolution" by Brian Eno: the non-musician Englishman creates music without stage or musicians to soundproof airports or meet the intersection with other components of a filmic texture, but it is always created music and that's it; in this case, ambient music is the re-materialization in the channels of "this space" of rustles, background noises, hums, and more strictly musical melodies captured in other parallel environmental spaces. In strictly musical sense, the material as stated above comes from different art pieces and installations, and the space that such sounds "dress" (ambient music like Christo's Land Art?) is an inseparable component.

Inevitable labels: there are many echoes of cosmic music, especially Faust and Tangerine Dream, electrostatic rustles as in the second track "Slow Motion" dissolve to transform into a powerful rhythmic pulse, "Hearing Is Believing" is structured in a second melodic part in which a piano solo is repeated endlessly until it fades out, and in a first part made of sounds, noises, and fragments of vocal conversations recorded from broadcasts on the first "experimental" UK radio station on frequency 105.8; "A Piece Of Monologue" (reproduced since 1988) reproduces the sampling of a telephone conversation with obscure meaning in which one seems to decode the fragment of a monologue by Samuel Beckett.

The development of sonic art (or the sonic section of art in its broadest sense) develops over 12 years (from 1984 to 1997) documented by this small classic possibly indispensable for avant-ambient enthusiasts; for others who wish to try listening, it could constitute an interesting reflection on how, once again, those who concentrate in few but extremely dense works (in total the actual "albums" should be 4) while possibly remaining on the margins can later be "rediscovered" in terms of intuitions, fragments of ideas, fragments and nothing more in the most varied and sometimes unthinkable works of pop-stars who background-wise declare themselves "great-estimators-of-..." or more simply observe in filigree the wonder of the moment coinciding with the phase of constructive processes that lead to the status of music what previously was not music.

Takk

.:3:.