After assembling over fifty releases from 2010-2014, Milan’s Senufo Editions re-originates with a new multi-media triptych, snf01-03. The trio includes a CD set, 3 Pauses, by the label’s founder Giuseppe Ielasi, a book, Elemental Studies, by Japanese composer Takamitsu Ohta, and a very pretty cassette from Senufo mainstay Alessandro Brivio.
SB samples, cuts, culls, mauls, blinks, messes, muses, gestures, screeches out, utters to, mouths from the soundtrack to Amir Naderi’s 2005 film Sound Barrier. In the film, which is divided into two sections, Naderi’s deaf and mute 11-year old protagonist, Jesse, traverses NYC to try to find, and, eventually, engage with, a cassette tape full of recordings of his deceased mother’s voice.
For Variety, Ronnie Schieb describes the film as “both stylistic tour-de-force and [a] never-ending assault on one’s patience,” and “the most extended mise en scene of pure frustration in cinema history.” Brivio hears this, too, frustrating pockets of near-silence and gristly loops against long stretches of chopped and fanatic noise.
At one point in the film, Jesse tries to pay a stranger to dictate his mother’s words so that he can ‘hear’ her by reading their lips. Babble stabilizes itself against the balance of an action; destabilizes against the imbalance of spontaneity, suspicion, interpretation. Stranger says, “I can’t listen to this anymore.” And the tape is flung off of a bridge.
Listen to an excerpt below and direct all other questions, purchases, and praise to Senufo.
More about: Alessandro Brivio
