First vinyl edition of Giuseppe Ielasi's archipelago of animated sound sculptures, originally released in 2012 as a limited-edition CD on his Senufo Editions label, with recordings made in 2011 as a commission by
Jérôme Noetinger for l'Audible Festival, Paris.
The album's ten tracks have neither titles nor accompanying text, standing for themselves as what Ielasi himself has called "isolated sound worlds". They are nonetheless unparalleled in their plasticity, acoustic events with a rare degree of tangibility. Ielasi evokes physical objects, some of which seem to have been constructed out of paper and cardboard, others based on a mechanics of elastic materials. Of course these objects are hallucinations, and precisely because Ielasi constructs them so masterfully there's no need for any further information. Here's to everyone creating their very own sculptures while listening to Rhetorical Islands!
The front and back cover features 0.058, a work on paper by the artists Thomas & Renée Rapedius. They make sculptures whose form and artistic inspiration are defined by their materials. Like Ielasi's acoustic islands, their impact derives from self-referentiality, resulting in paradoxical objects that embody both a detailed material study and a potential for free association.
Giuseppe Ielasi (born in 1974, lives near Milan since 1990) started playing guitar in 1988, and worked for many years in the area of “improvised music” (long term collaborations with Renato Rinaldi in the duo Oreledigneur,
Thomas Ankersmit,
Michel Doneda, Ingar Zach,
Dean Roberts).
Between 1997 and 2006 he has performed live with Taku Sugimoto,
Jérôme Noetinger, Mark Wastell, Martin Siewert, Nmperign,
Brandon Labelle, Nikos Veliotis,
Alessandro Bosetti, Gert-Jan Prins,
Phill Niblock,
Oren Ambarchi, and many others.
From 2007 on, his main interest has been in site-specific solo performances, still using guitars as primary sound sources but integrating microphones and multi-channel speaker systems in order to create complex networks for sound diffusion in relationship to space.
He recently started a collaboration with Austrian video artist Michaela Grill (US tour in 2007, participations at the Rotterdam Film Festival, Evolution Festival in Leed, FilmSoundFilm in Marfa,TX) and is more and more involved in performances and installations with Renato Rinaldi and
Armin Linke (ZKM Karlsruhe, Villa Romana Florence, Kunsthalle Berlin, Festival della Scienza Genova).
In 1998 he founded the “Fringes recordings” label, closed in 2005, and co-founded “Schoolmap Records” in 2006.
See also
Bellows (Giuseppe Ielasi &
Nicola Ratti).
