The science of imagination. Sussurra Luce is a recording and radio project produced by Dischi Fantom and curated by Francesco Cavaliere. Through the work of contemporary authors, it explores, and blurs, the boundaries between text, music and voice; the tone of the conversations among literature and sound. In November 2021 it introduces its activities as a monthly radio show, where Francesco Cavaliere will host international artists, writers and thinkers. Broadcasted by Radio Raheem, the webradio headquartered in Triennale Milano, the city’s main public institution dedicated to design and architecture, the visual and the performing arts. Amen.
Sussurra Luce 02: Zoomachia Disc 1 by Francesco Cavaliere
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.
Read more in the page dedicated to this release.
Sussurra Luce 01: Il Calore Animale by Ginevra Bompiani, Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage
The LP, ‘Il Calore Animale’ comprises four short stories read by Ginevra Bompiani, recorded at her home in 2018 by Francesco Cavaliere, that were originally published in her volume ‘Le Specie del Sonno’ (The Species of Sleep) in 1975 with an introduction by Italo Calvino, where he stated “The landscape created by her prose recalls those paintings in which peaceful figures are asleep in a quiet wood, or a solitary house, or any place where the senses can dim and reason’s guard is dropped.”
Read more in the page dedicated to this release.
Episode 05: Carmelo, Bene e l’Androide with Enzo Mansueto, Massimo Torrigiani and Francesco Cavaliere
16 March 2022
Since Sussurra Luce explores the spaces where voices, words, sounds, music, and their media carcasses, meet and collide, we could not fail to introduce you, in our own way and sooner or later, Carmelo Bene, who is an extreme synthesis of these encounters. We do it on March 16, 2022, on the 20th anniversary of his passage to another life: this one. A reconnaissance broadcast in the company of Enzo Mansueto, who has been following his adventures since the 1980s. The usual episode of Sussurra Luce is followed, from 9 to 11 pm, by a selection of pieces that Massimo Torrigiani put together with plays by Bene himself, music he used in his theatre, radio and television works, songs by his contemporaries, associates and collaborators, and by those who were inspired by him and who seem to follow his footsteps.
Read more in the page dedicated to this episode.
Episode 04: Francesco Cavaliere
reads Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us
8 February 2022
Francesco Cavaliere reads Rachel L. Carson, The Sea Around Us, part one: Mother Sea, The Grey Beginnings. (first edition 1951; first Italian edition Einaudi, 1973. Italian translation by Gianluigi Mainardi). Original music by Lieven Martens Moana and Christina Vantzou.
Read more in the page dedicated to this episode.
Episode 03: Erik Bünger
11 January 2022
A creature that does not speak, a creature you cannot speak of. An elephant in every room. A white bear, whose silhouette looms larger with every effort to keep it out of your mind.
Erik Bünger is an artist, writer and composer, whose work investigates the relationship between language and concepts such as ‘voice’, ‘body’, ‘image’ and ‘nature’. In lecture performances, videos, texts and musical compositions he explores how such concepts, by referring to something mute and unspeakable beyond the reach of language, become central voids around which our reality is built up. His work have been presented around the world in venues such as Centre Pompidou in Paris, The Wellcome Collection in London, The Lincoln Center in New York, KW in Berlin and The Curitiba Biennial in Brazil. He currently holds a four-year research fellowship at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, where he leads a team of researchers in an investigation of the concept of ‘voice-over’.
References and readings: G. Bataille, ‘The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth of Art’ in The Cradle of Humanity, Zone Books, New York 2005; M. Dolar, ‘Hegel and Freud’ in e-flux Journal #34, April 2012; D. Heller-Roazen, ‘Aleph’ in Echolalias: On the Forgetting of Language, Zone Books, New York 2005; A. Zupančič, ‘Not-Mother: On Freud’s Verneinung’ in e-flux Journal #33, March 2012.
Episode 02: Altalena and Roope Eronen
8 December 2021
Altalena is a nomadic entity dedicated to foster art practices at a slow pace. The collective values interdisciplinarity and communitarianism as devices for creating meaning and knowledge. Their research focuses on communal life, hermitage, subconscious, play, childhood, time, and the Unknown.
Roope Eronen is sound producer, comic artist, founder of the fluorescent Lal Lal Lal records a long with his KutiKuti magazine. A cultural explosion from Finland. Working in a Suomi Beer factory he plays in groups like Avarus, Keijut, Nuslux, Mu*mit and Nolls. Pacific City Sound Visions released his latest solo album “The Inflatable World” in 2021.
Episode 01: Claire Tolan
9 November 2021
When I began to write my Cicada Games, I was thinking about the emergence and spread of rumour, and the myth that makes cicadas spies for the muses. It seemed to me that cicadas play a single, simple game (emerging, singing, mating, dying), and I began to wonder what would happen if cicadas were indeed called to play a different game entirely, a game of espionage that forced them to inhabit a human-like consciousness.
Read Claire Tolan’s essay On Cicadas and Cicada Games
Claire Tolan (b. 1986) is an American artist and programmer living in Berlin. Tolan has worked primarily with ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) since 2013. Her work is concerned with the phenomenology and poetics of whispered speech, with a particular focus on rumour, secrets, and enthralldom. Tolan hosted an ASMR radio show, “You’re Worth It”, on Berlin Community Radio from 2013-2019. She has exhibited, performed, and presented her work at venues such as Martin Gropius Bau, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berghain, Volksbuehne, CTM Festival (all Berlin), Mira Festival (Barcelona), Rokolectiv Festival (Bucharest), Münchner Kammerspiele (Munich), Goethe-Institut London, ArkDes (Stockholm), and Sonar+D (Barcelona). With musician Holly Herndon, she co-wrote and performed “Lonely at the Top”, the ASMR track on Herndon’s 2015 album Platform. Tolan is currently developing two ASMR technology platforms, CICADA GAMES, an augmented reality, episodic audio play, and SOOTHER, an AI ASMRtist. Tolan studied English Literature at the University of Chicago and Archival Science and Information Analysis at the University of Michigan School of Information.
Francesco Cavaliere is a visual artist, writer and musician born in Piombino and raised in Volterra. He lives and works between Berlin and Turin. His work develops into a polymorphic activity that integrates writing, sound, voice, drawing and sculpture to stimulate the imagination, undertaking long journeys crossed by ephemeral presences. He writes sound stories and musical compositions often integrated with installation and scenographic elements. Over the years he has created his imaginative dictionary, a catalog of metamorphic beings that inhabit an abstract and fantastic universe: hybrids of objects, animals, plants, planets, traces, cosmic objects and physical and perceptive phenomena generated by glass, minerals and voices recorded and realized with analog and digital technologies. Since 2011, Cavaliere has created performances, light and sound interventions, concerts, radio and video-audio works, audio-stories and readings, such as: Glass Music (2020), Il Cavaliere Leonardo (2019), Imitatori del tempo (2019), DNA CLEPSYDRA (2019), Rivers of Balsamo (2019), Weather Imitators (2018), Murals of the landscape (2018), Green Music (2017-19), Gancio Cielo I-II (2016-2020). His work has been shown in museums, art centers and international festivals. Recent solo shows include: Anubis vs Baboon (2019) Gluck 50, Milan. Francesco Cavaliere, also known as Francis Knight, has released the double LP Gancio Cielo (Hundebiss Records), for which he also curated the online project Musica Virtuale, the Etrusca 3D album with Spencer Clark (Discrepant), on cassette and digital , Xylomania (Edicoes CN), Doro Bengala (2010).
