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'Broadcast One' - Dandelion Radio's 1st compilation album

NEWS:
Only three days left to hear our March stream - otherwise go to MixCloud to listen without detailed artist/gig info

Artist Info

Claudio Rocchetti

Claudio Rocchetti
Image from Discogs
Powered by Audioscrobbler™claudio rocchetti: inside the body of sound

The work of Claudio Rocchetti is a deep plunge into thick sound, investigating its innermost workings. Using a variety of devices such as turntables, audio cassettes, samplers, radios, and microphones, often incorporating other objects and traditional instruments, Berlin-based Rocchetti builds compelling structures that employ sound as sheer matter, mass, and impact. “I have a very direct approach to sound, trying to act on instruments and devices,” he says.

The tarry, mesmerizing hues that characterize his “music objects” are grounded in layers of sound detritus, as in his 2003 solo albums, The Work Called Kitano, on Bar La Muerte, and But Speak Fair Words, on S’Agita. The pieces on these CDs are never self-contained: they function as open plateaux on which various solutions coexist as part of a sound continuum that stretches in time. “I proceed by hints—I love the unfinished. This doesn’t mean that my music is aphoristic: I try to reach the essential by summing up all the visions I get. Segments from the past appear and want to be recorded. My background mixes up. That’s why I face various elements within one piece.” Burned, for example, a piece from Kitano, employs a sample from a Mendelssohn-Bartholdy vinyl, rotated by hand, against small percussive effects and abstract noises from skipping CDs, overlapped by piercing rhythms. The impression is of witnessing the intersection of timeless samples in the fraction of time available on the recording; yet these are part of a larger sound whole, greater than the recording. Rocchetti’s focus is never on frenzied sound collage per se: he lingers on every sample and lets it breathe, so that it opens up and resonates with memories and less obvious structural implications. “I choose certain samples because I am fascinated by them. They have to strike me with qualities that go far beyond what can be measured by frequency or spectre. I am interested in melancholy and the relationship between an environment and its history, either as living memory or as reverberations of a presence.”

For Rocchetti, any recollection from the past is re-enacted in and through the factuality of the record as object: “Each sample is always played by hand; I never let the vinyl record spin by itself. Most times I use turntables as percussion instruments: I stop the records with Sellotape, and use the needles as small microphones. I play the surface of records using sticks, leaves, sand, and paper. Other times, I use records without a groove. Memory, be it absent or denied, is the main glue between all these elements.” From techno rhythms to slow melodies, edgy constructions to samples of choirs and strings, Rocchetti builds layered structures of elusive elements whose sources are often hidden, and enacts a mirror play which may cause dizziness.

His interest in the cinema from the Far East hints at another dimension of his complex compositions. Take as an example director Wong Kar Wai and the way that he employs gestures to set up an environment but not necessarily an action: time in his films is expanded. This is what Rocchetti does with sound, setting up an atmosphere that may apparently be uneventful, but in which what is hidden behind the scenes can be as relevant as what is on the surface.

Daniela Cascella, Musicworks

related projects:
http://www.last.fm/music/3%252F4HadBeenEliminated
http://www.last.fm/music/OLYVETTY

Read more on Last.fm. User-contributed text is available under the Creative Commons By-SA License; additional terms may apply.
Artist biography from last.fm




Some other places to look for information:
last.fm
Discogs
MusicBrainz