I’ve devoted a fairly significant chunk of my life to studying music theory/composition at an academic level and one of the major benefits I’ve gained from this education is the ability to analyze/understand what I like about various pieces of music through listening. This practice has helped me understand why particular harmonies draw me to certain types of pop music, but its equally taught me the power of frequency, timbre, and space in all sorts of composition. The knowledge I believe can be particularly useful when articulating what’s going on in a given experimental piece on a sonic level but it’s also exciting when a piece of music sounds so wonderfully alien that no amount of acoustic training can even begin to convey what’s happening.
Enrico Malatesta’s recent release Benandare is one of those works that I truly don’t understand on a sonic level and I absolutely love it for this reason. I’d guess that these works were made digitally if the album didn’t credit Malatesta with only “skin instruments and metal objects”. With that initial description of instrumentation, one would think that the sound world of this record would be rather predictable but any notion of what these simple materials can do is quickly dispelled on the album’s opening track. Malatesta’s music on Benandare seems to be largely made from dragging various objects across different resonant surfaces but even that doesn’t fully explain the wide spectrum of noise that the composer gets on these works or how/why that noise is so beautiful. Each one of these three pieces fades in and out of silences that further mask the spectrally rich white noise generated by Malatesta’s objects and as the album progresses, it’s possible to hear tonal/timbral shifts within the noise of each track. As a result, Benandare has an effect similar to both Vomir and Rale’s recent work but with the instrumental ingenuity of Nick Hennies’ similarly minded snare drum playing. It’s a mesmerizing work because of it’s construction and the continuing dialogue between silence and noise that is invoked through Malatesta’s sounds.
Benandare is out now via Weighter Recordings. You can listen to an excerpt of the album below:
• Enrico Malatesta: http://www.enricomalatesta.com
• Weighter Recordings: http://www.weighterrecordings.com
More about: Enrico Malatesta
