Valerio Tricoli, A Circle of Grey, 2024

A Circle of Grey is an electroacoustic composition by Valerio Tricoli that blends philosophical contemplation on transience and impermanence and musical exploration. His sonic palette takes on the refractions of non-color to create an experience always poised between tangibility and abstraction. Using synthetic sounds and sounds captured from reality then manipulated through a Revox reel-to-reel tape recorder, A Circle of Grey defies easy categorization, as Valerio Tricoli seamlessly integrates a variety of techniques and elements into an arid, broken, deserted, haunted, but nonetheless fascinating soundscape. In its essence, A Circle of Grey is characterized by a constant tension between sounds that are buzzing and alive on the surface of the speakers and sounds that move instead in the depths of the acoustic field, as if an imagined reality were experienced through the ever-changing reflections of shattered crystals. A seemingly aimless, timeless wandering over sands of silica and quartz, where everything is co-present and distant, affirmed and denied, where relics of humanity are found and soon lost again. Opting for an evocative rather than descriptive plane, the composition invites interpretive ambiguity: despite these existential themes, there is also a sense of beauty and hope. Tricoli’s use of circularity and subtle timbral and dynamic variations create a sense of depth and progression aimed at transcending linear time; the movements in the composition continually fold in on themselves and echo in the listener’s mind.

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