This project stems from our dissatisfaction towards a number of constraints that, in our view, bind contemporary music. Namely:

• the mix up between art and culture

by which we mean that art and culture have become synonymous in the public discourse, while in our eyes - moving from Edgard Wind - they mimick the difference between literature and linguistics, or better yet - moving from Pulhan - that between Terrorists and Rhetors.

• the mechanisms of production

by which we mean that the the act of commission, which is the basis of the creativity industry, has become generally tasteless, moving away - in our Virgilian eyes - from Augustus in the public sphere, and from Maecenas in the private one. In contemporary music the commission has become more and more a function of academia - culture - and less and less a matter of necessity - art -, divorcing itself completely from the audience.

• the role of the composer, of the interpreter and of the audience

by which we mean that the role of the composer finds value only in the ideal of novelty, that the role of the interpreter has increasingly flattened on the role of the performer, and that the listening act has become mostly intellectual sterilizing any spontaneity from the audience.

• the function of the concert

by which we mean that the concert is considered a-critically as the best and truest medium of fruition of contemporary music; and that it is viewed unquestionably both as the means and as the end of any compositional act.

• the disregard towards the record as a work of art

by which we mean that the reflections of Walter Benjamin around the technical reproducibility of art have never really been taken into account in the contemporary music discourse, and that the function of the record, contrary to pop music, is reduced to a documentation of a live performance rather than a work of art in itself.

In order to free ourselves from said constraints, we conceived A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Band, a project that is - as Janus - dual. Dual in the sense that it is imagined as part record and part live performance, where one makes sense in light of the existance of the other. We believe that through giving creative dignity to the record we can give a new sense to the concert.

Work and Methodology

Our four-hand work is not a collaboration or an aggregate of experties, it is not the sum of two composers working together. Our creative relationship is instead that of the band, something we are interested in claiming both as a symbolic universe and as an example of joint effort.

As mentioned, we are convinced that listening to a concert and listening to a record are two very distinct listening experiences. What works in a record, in terms of events, of temporality, of sound, of dynamics, doesn’t necessarily work in a concert and vice versa.

Therefore we approached these two realities as two faces of the same object.

Our creativity - much like that of Glenn Gould post 1964 and that of The Beatles post 1966 - stemmed within the recording studio, where we inverted what is usually regarded as the compositional process.

Instead of first writing and then playing and recording, we first played and recorded, then interpreted and then wrote.

In other words, we decoupled the act of composing and the act of writing.

The possibility of listening again offered by the playback allowed us to compose in real-time, shaping our work in the liquid state that flows between being at the same time composers, interpreters and audience.

This allowed us to become accustomed with the identity of our work, and to imagine a live performance - one of the possible interpretations - at the same time as we were immersed in the compositional stage.

Lyrics

2. Alba

Swim in line

to the reef, I’m fine,

baptized.

Hairy goats swim by

they’re bone dry.

Why?

Wearing suits and ties

they say hi

How can we sit here and chat

when all around us is so flat?

3. Never Realized

I never realized

upon it’s falling

I’ve been sinking in the carpet while my hair’s been slowly growin’

I never realized

upon it’s falling

I’ve been staring at the ceiling while my bloodstream kept on flowin’

I never realized

upon it’s falling

goat hindquarters horns and boners reign above our God all knowing

4. Foschia

One is all and from it all and if it isn’t

nothing is all and from it all and if it isn’t

8. Promenade

9 6 9 5 5

Dejavu

Frankenstein design

5 6 9

my eyes

9 7 8

nevermind

bye bye bye