Curva Cieca Oblio was born out of the collaboration between two artists whose paths have intertwined many times over the course of twenty years. The work of Muna Mussie, who investigates the languages of the visual and performing arts, for this creation on record extends and enters into a fusional dialogue with the rigorous and prismatic sound vision of Massimo Carozzi, also an explorer of the relationships between different languages. In Curva Cieca Oblio the material questions the spirit to bring different collective and personal oblivion to light and deconstruct macro narratives. Mussie's research escapes the literality of meaning, and textile art and embroidery are some of the techniques used by the artist to highlight the visible, the invisible and the tactile.
Consisting of three parts, the album opens with Cieca, a sonic illusion of any progress. Cieca moves blindly within the grammar of an adverse text and a continuous stumbling demolishes its meaning, recalling to the ear a sort of freestyle, a break dance of the word that introduces a rhythmic plan with its own sense and form. Cieca is the thread between the two subsequent pieces, Curva and Oblio, a traction between the different codes and practices that accompanied the production of this sound object. Curva is built on the fusion of a fragment taken from a piece of Tigrinya music with the mechanical rhythm of a sewing machine. This rhythmic homophony develops between asynchronies and coincidences, integrated by voices sampled inside a baobab-church during an Eritrean Coptic ceremony. The song resolves in a circular manner, supported by a pulsating bass line and articulated by a polyrhythmic guitar pattern. Curva seeks through repetition to capture and point to what escapes and at the same time presses on, to trace nomadic seams, distinctive signs or hybrids, manifested only in the syncopated and sobbing moment of time. "The stratifications of distant rites and objects stand out in the space of the present, to remind us of a memory, or to forget oblivion". The long apnea of Oblio comes from an action, a collective ritual, where awall of fabric is the frame from which the voices and bare hands of the participants sew. The word OBLIO (Oblivion) spoken, written, vocalized, embroidered, lamented through word of mouth in its constant repetition becomes the body of a sound composition.In the version for the record of Oblio the performers were recorded separately, providing their materials subsequently organized into a composition based on a collection of iterations on which various parts, selected from the vocal improvisations, intersect. The layers thus obtained reveal the harmonic connections of the voices, and are based on compositional solutions that restructure disconnected vocal fragments, in an idea of reconstructing a collective breath. Curva, Curva Cieca, Oblio are also the titles of performances by Muna Mussie created between 2019 and 2023.
Limited edition of 150 numbered copies.
Muna Mussie (born 1978) is an Eritrean multidisciplinary artist based in Bologna. Her work moves between gesture, vision and word, crossed by the practice of embroidery, and investigates the languages of the arts to give shape to the tension that arises between different expressive poles, private and public, memory and oblivion, visible and invisible.
Mussie began her artistic career in 1998, as actress/performer with Teatrino Clandestino. In 2002 she attended the European advanced training course for the actor, led by Cesare Ronconi of the Valdoca Theater and continued the collaboration as an actress until 2012. From 2001 to 2005 she was an active part in the research collective Open, the project that marked her desire to investigate her own ways of being on stage. Since 2006, she has conceived, staged, and interpreted her own works.
Massimo Carozzi (born 1967 in Massa) is a sound recordist, sound designer and musician based in Bologna, Italy. Since 1994 he has looked into relations between sound and image, sound and script, sound and literature, sound and space. Massimo Carozzi has created sound design for theatre, documentaries, short films, installations. In 2000 with Anna Rispoli and Anna de Manincor he founded
ZimmerFrei, with which he participated in group and solo exhibitions, film, music and theater festivals in Italy and abroad. Carozzi has participated in music and sound projects, including: El Muniria, Weight And Treble, Auriga, Phonorama, Auna. He has collaborated, in studio and live, with several musicians and artists including Andrea Belfi, Stefano Pilia, Margareth Kammerer,
Valerio Tricoli,
Claudio Rocchetti,
Luciano Maggiore, Sinistri, 3/4HadBeenEliminated, Starfuckers, Massimo Volume, Dominique Vaccaro, Emidio Clementi, Susanna La Polla De Giovanni,
Muna Mussie.
