Hailing from Genoa, Italy, electronic music visionary Guido Affini sets his sights on the furthest depths of consciousness where the tension of the unknown looms large. On his stunning new “RUST” EP, he sets his mind’s eye on the furthest reaches of our vast oceans where our human endeavors inevitably cannot reach. An unpredictable cocktail of IDM, ambient, industrial, noise and field recordings await adventurous listeners willing to take this perilous journey. “RUST” is out Feb 26th.
RUST is an EP of electro-acoustic music, captured, parceled, decomposed and recomposed by Guido Affini. Rust is entirely made up of underwater recordings made in various contexts over the last decade.
“These recordings made through hydro phonic techniques are a cross-section of the noise pollution that pervades the industrialized seabed of our seas: the acoustic emanations of commercial ports, the oscillations of wrecks on the seabed, engines, the alarms of cargo ships…
The sounds captured during these sessions are the acoustic instruments on which the timbre, rhythmic and harmonic articulations that make up RUST are experimented through the granular synths. “Rust is an electrochemical process that metaphorically represents the alchemization to which Guido Affini has subjected the sounds captured during the hydro phonic sessions through granular synths.”
RUSTY GHOST was born from the recordings made near a wreck off the Ligurian Sea.
During the sessions the sea was particularly rough, this condition meant that the oscillations, the clashes between the wreck of the wreck produced particularly intense clangors and screeches.
The remaining alchemized sounds from the granulars come from acquisitions made under the commercial port of Genoa in full activity: the engines, the alarms of a cargo ship that docked at the pier was crammed with containers. Rusty Ghost is the story of an environment contaminated by the acoustic oppression that human activities have produced on our seas.
As happened in the “first era” of industrial music, the distortions of the machines become a metaphor for the transmutations triggered by the empty industrial ritual. Rusthy Ghost is the voice of the sea that turns its song into a scream.
HYDRO CHECK was built through samples from a collection of hydrophone checks and acoustic accidents. The check is the instant when the hydrophone is immersed in the sea during the recording sessions. This type of glitch is characterized by a profound change in pressure in the microphone transducer. The moment in which you pass from an aerial environmental field to an underwater environment, an intense spike on the medium- low frequencies. Acoustic accidents come from the moments when the submerged hydrophone collides with a solid surface such as hulls, chains, docks.
Through granular synths Guido Affini creates the rhythmic sequences that constitute Hydro Check. The compressors work on the sound pressure of the hydro phonic transient by generating subharmonic peaks. Hydrophone check is a constant transition between two environmental states, a tribal fluctuation that recalls immersion and emergence, an indeterministic rhythmic state.
CONDENSATION arises from the slippage of the hydrophone cable resting on the edge of a barge. This tension produces a vibration in the transducer on the rope immersed at a depth of twelve meters.
From the recordings emerges this low-toned vibration that is processed like an instrument via granular synths.
The clangors and screeches of the wrecks, the fluctuation of the gravel on the seabed, the sounds of a marina at night, the flows of the currents off the Gulf of Tigullio, the metallic tinkling of the masts of the boats are the counterpoints to this dialogue with black hues.
Condensation is an imaginative journey into a city swallowed up by the sea. A walk in a wrecked metropolis at the bottom of the ocean where human activity is a memory.
