Faravelli, Attila, artist.

Lattina.

[Place of publication not identified] : Lateral Addition, 2015.

1 online resource.

Lateral Addition ; 24

"On June 6th and 18th of 2015, I recorded the sounds Enrico produced from manipulating empty aluminum cans. Discouraged by the boomy sound of Enrico's living room (let alone the noises coming from a few hyperactive neighbors) we decided to take the car out and go in search of a quiet spot in the country. On the crest of a hill we found an almost anechoic slope, populated by dense tall grass. We wanted the recording to be "pure" - as dry and close up as possible in order to verify with plenty of sonic detail the reasons an object that belongs in the trash was so appealing to us. What follows is a transcription, translated from Italian, of a conversation between Enrico and I recorded on July 15th, 2015. Audio companion mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. - AF - EM: I started playing with empty cans totally by chance, while doing a residency at an art gallery in Canada. I remember that I had stumbled on some videos, on the Internet, about so called rudimentary ethnic percussion; during those solitary nights, after a few beers, I absentmindedly started crushing and manipulating the empty beer cans, I kind of tried to imitate, by rhythmically pushing with my fingers the tin, some simple patterns that I had heard in the documentaries. At first, quite naively, I had considered the tin as a means to get a sound that was already present in my mind, treating the can as an inert piece of rubbish, which it is, that I could play as if it were a musical instrument. After a while I realized that the can, when manipulated, would reveal an interesting ability to deform and to react in unpredictable ways. This might sound pretty trivial but I realized that with the disposable material I would allow myself to produce deformations to the aluminum that were non reversible, to slowly destroy the can, and that the affordances of this proto instrument would evolve over time accordingly. Simply put, what the can was offering me in terms of its possibilities would change quite a lot while messing with it. AF: I recall you telling me that you were very productive during that specific residency, playing and recording a lot. It strikes me that you probably were quite unfocused while making sounds with empty beer cans at the end of the day, on top of that you had drank them all till the last drop... I find the loose nature of these moments quite interesting, that you found something inspiring while in a relaxed mood, while perceiving and listening in a less direct but maybe wider way? EM: When I "play" the can, I try to be both distracted and focused, in order to be able to enjoy a material with a behaviour I cannot fully control nor understand, as I said a tin transforms itself in time, by undergoing deformations. Also, manipulating soft and thin metals gives me a tactile pleasure. In my work with the percussion instruments I've been practicing this a lot, by listening with my fingers (my ears are not alone here) to all of the kinds of properties of an object; every time I touch an object this provides me with information about its internal structure, its weight, its grain, its robustness or conversely its impermanence. In this sense, the point of loosening time with rubbish cans has to do with adapting my hand's posture to an object that transforms itself, also knowing that my actions will damage it forever. It's a matter of practical understanding, very physical, and as a measure of that also enjoyable. AF: What you say about playing something that bends and breaks and at the end gets ripped apart makes me think in relation to the normal musical instruments, especially the ones from the western tradition. It's as if they were built so that a musician would be able to predict their sound. A well trained piano player, for example, knows how to get a certain sound: by pressing a middle C he's gonna hear a middle C, if he presses the same key heavier he'll hear the very same sound, just louder. A philosopher that I like a lot, Manuel Delanda, insists on the rarity of linear processes in nature, linearity is the exception not the rule; by introducing the same kind of energy in the same system, but varying its amount, the effect can change a lot. In his public lectures he sometimes uses this example: try to pull your lip, the more you pull, the more the lip goes forward, even a light force is enough. But then it comes to a point when pulling gently doesn't produce any movement in the lip, our flesh resists the pulling and in order to get the lip moving we need to pull harder, there's almost no such thing as a linear process. Another intensive threshold (that's what Manuel Delanda calls them) occurs when water freezes or boils, cooling or warming water by a certain amount produces predictable effects, you just get cooler or warmer water, but at certain specific "intensive thresholds" the water freezes or boils. The same is true with cans, a slight pressure allows the material to bend back to its initial state, reestablishing its original form, a stronger pressure produces a definitive deformation in the aluminum. You are right when you say that it's a matter of practical understanding, the only way to go is by doing it. Another fundamental contribution by Manuel De Landa is the clarification of what Gilles Deleuze meant with ''topological thinking''. It's a philosophically very dense, almost specialistic concept but I feel like it applies perfectly to your "dirty" practice of playing the cans... If "intensive thinking" (derived from thermodynamics) destroys the foundations of linear causation by acknowledging any subject or object as having the capacity to form "assemblages" with other subjects or objects whose emergent properties are always new, specific, creative and unpredictable, "topological thinking" stems from differential geometry and consists of describing an object without building a set of abstract coordinates around it. Let's say you want to describe a curved flat sheet of paper; an old scientist would start building around this object a set of abstract coordinates and would measure the distances of any point on the object to these out of the world straight lines. Modern geometry, and Deleuze suggests we should do the same when reasoning, gets rid of this metaphysical "shoe-box" and undertakes the description of the object in a more concrete way; by checking the actual differences and accelerations along the material itself. Deleuze seems to suggest that an object is better described the same way our physical experience of the world is, which is very different from tracing mental coordinates. Our body deals primarily with a set of accelerations and curvatures relative to other points on the same surface, when we touch and manipulate an object we perceive directly a series of immanent differences, in order to understand something we have to stay "attached" to it. Speaking about the way music is practiced by many people (I know a few jazz and conservatory trained musicians), it seems like they struggle all the time to reach an "optimum standard", which would exists in some ideal space, be it the real intention of the composer who wrote the score that they are going to play or a flawless technical ability on the instrument. Manipulating a can, for as trivial, for as rough as it might be, forces you to be primarily concerned with the way the material folds, breaks, bends, resonates. EM: Talking about musical instruments, a drum, for example, is made from many different materials: skin, wood, metal. There's a lot of ways to play it, you can articulate its sound in many ways. A beer can of course is completely different, let alone it's not designed to be used that way... it's made out of just one material, it's very uniform and the way accents are produced is spontaneous, they naturally come out of torsion, ripping, bending, compression, decompression. At the same time it has a resonating chamber and it can get pretty loud. Working with "readymades" actually makes me think about the norm, the musical instrument.
A drum is conceived, as you say, to exhibit a consistent performance, when you play it you are supposed to stay within a limited range of force applied to the skin, unless you want to break it... AF: I guess a proper musical instrument is built in such a way to offer the musician a certain degree of comfort as well, which also stabilizes the way one plays and the level of confidence in what can be achieved in terms of sound, when applying a specific force in a specific way. Speaking of which, I've been noticing that your hands were sweating a lot while messing around with the tin... EM: Yes, that's true. The aluminum that the can is made from, unlike the skin of a drum, or the wood of a stick, doesn't absorb the sweat. But that's also interesting, the grip fails on you every now and then and this forces you to look for another way to handle the object. This adds to the overall instability. I'd say that the can's "capriciousness" offers me the opportunity to keep the "instrument" (the can) at a distance. You really have to listen to its behavior, there's no way for me to merge with the instrument the way I am able to when I play instruments that I have trained on; I know well how they will react to my actions and this will lend to a unification between me and the instrument. When I play the percussion instruments I feel like "owning" the instrument whereas with a can the aluminum is working against my intentions and ideas, and I have to deal with that. AF: It's probably just a futile effort trying to establish a form of linear cause-effect relationship while "playing" a can... Let's think about playing any instrument in general: it takes someone to apply a force to an object, it doesn't matter whether you are blowing the hell out of a trumpet or caressing a harp's string. If you hit a drum strongly, not only will the sound be loud but the stick will rebound back strongly as well. If you hit the same skin lightly, the sound will be soft and the rebound will be lighter. This is a kind of linear behavior. After a while your body will learn how to merge your musical intention and the instrument together, and achieving that is perhaps the main struggle for every musician. Being able to access a form of fusional playing. The mainstream idea is that you have to master the control on the instrument in order to achieve this merging. On the contrary, when you produce sounds within a system within which the force that you inject achieves unpredictable results, well maybe in this case it's another class of skills that has to be evoked, like an ability to listen and to react, I don't know. EF: I have to say that I'm not so much interested in the kind of "tension" that occurs when you try to control an object and it doesn't let you do so, that's sort of typical of some experimental musicians who know the technique of their instrument very well, and they intentionally push their instruments to the limit in order to lose control. That seems strange to me... What I'm interested in is similar to that but on the surface. When I play the can, I sometimes feel as if I were keeping an object with a life of its own in my hands, like as if it were kind of suspended. It's nothing magic, it's not as if the object were actually alive... at the same time, to some degree, it is pulsating on its own and I can feel as if it were at a distance, on another level from me, sort of autonomous, so to speak. I'm producing sound by manipulating it but this sound is not fully contained in my hands, the cracklings happen along invisible tanglings that pertain to the object itself, not to myself. It's quite different than hitting a percussion instrument and in doing so putting its membrane into motion. When I keep the can in my hands and I shake it, it crackles in crazy ways, sometimes it really surprises me. AF: Although compact and uniform a can is a complex thing. If we think in terms of "elasticity", well, almost all the musical instruments are very "elastic" according to the dictionary: able to return to an original shape or size after being stretched, squeezed, etc. The strings on a violin or in a piano, after you have struck them, tend to go back to a state of static equilibrium, in this sense the engine of a musical instrument is elastic. Nonelastic systems can present a greater degree of complexity. At the same time the can also has the tendency to get back to its original shape, if you don't press too much. EM: It's strange because even if I cannot control or understand what's going on with the can, I can nevertheless recognize some tendencies that the object has. I cannot tell exactly what's going to be the next sound but I can recognize a generic path that it will follow. Anyway, I'm not so much interested in the "results", whether what I can achieve by crushing a can is gonna be nice or musical. Instead, I find it useful as a form of research, as an activity that forces me to listen to an object, to explore its tendencies, and most of all I consider it a tool to train and to expand my perception. AF: Looking at you while playing the can recalls a basketball player spinning a basketball on the tip of his finger. To keep the ball from falling he has to tap it from time to time, and this must be done very carefully, in order to not interfere too much with the natural tendency of the ball to keep rotating. It's a fragile balance."-- provided by distributor.

Sound installations (Art)
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Laska, Eric, editor.
Malatesta, Enrico, artist.
Library Stack, distributor.
Library Stack.