Beatrice Goldoni, Ilaria Lemmo, Margherita Morgantin, COSMIC SILENCE 5, fluorescence 4, 2024

COSMIC SILENCE 5, fluorescence 4 stems from visual artist Margherita Morgantin’s dialogue with two female musicians and sound makers as part of her research project VIP=Violation of the Pauli exclusion principle (2020-21). The disc, the sixth release of XONG collection – artist’s records, hosts on the one hand the translation into sound spectra of a series of data from the VIP experiment underway in the bowels of the Abruzzo mountains at the Gran Sasso LNGS Nuclear Physics Laboratories, elaborated by composer Ilaria Lemmo: the electronic sound constantly oscillates between source and destination in an environment of pure suspension. On the other, it presents a road-noise-recording born from the artist’s solitary journey from Milan to Porto by car, elaborated together with Beatrice Goldoni. About this double composition, the titles draw from two inspirational sources: Cosmic Silence is an experiment born in the scientific field with the aim of furthering the study of the molecular mechanisms involved in the biological response to environmental radiation. Fluorescence alludes to the physical phenomenon of re-emission of received radiation that can be intercepted in the visible range in darkness. “Thus the gaze in darkness becomes listening.” (M.M.)

About the track Cosmic Silence (side A): “Sound processing is av- come through writing algorithms that take a point-or rather a list of values-and generate a sound, a spectrum, that is led to move toward another. A directional sound that constantly fluctuates between where it comes from and where it tends toward. An oscillation that also emerges in the very interior of the sound and its contours. The least condition for this movement to come out was to compose the numerical data, so complex but marked, to leave the possibility for a sound environment to be created where the “impossible atoms,” whose presence would violate Pauli’s Exclusion Principle, can find a listening space to happen.” (Ilaria Lemmo)

About the track Fluorescence (side B): “born from the narrative need for a journey, the composition is the result of a series of lo-fi recordings ef- fected by Margherita Morgantin during the car ride to the Serralves Museum in Porto. It is thus constituted as an essentially noise track in which the act of composition is reduced to the minimum possible, since the artistic and musi- cial gesture consists above all in the choice of the sound elements of the journey, letting the elements themselves resonate, and in the care of these sounds so that they reveal their polyhedral nature. The sound of the car is roar of the engine, at times more muffled, at times more enveloping, but it is also wind beating on metal and window glass. The sea, on the Portuguese coast, is a breath: breath for a voice that need not “mean” but is the sign of Morgantin’s passage through those places. The little bells (alluding to the resonant bell tied at the bottom of Morgantin’s wind sleeves – a recurring element in his research that signals the invisible movements of the air) are synaesthetically fluorescent, like the sleeve installed at Serralves and like the jackets of the workers working on the highways: the circle – the record – closes. To reopen with each new listening.” (Beatrice Goldoni)

Listen to excerpt
A:
Margherita Morgantin/Ilaria Lemmo – Cosmic Silence (20:50)

B:
Margherita Morgantin/Beatrice Goldoni – Fluorescence (15:28)