SILVIA COSTA / CLAUDIA ROCCHETTI, KEYHOLE MOUTH, 2025

Keyhole Mouth by Silvia Costa and Claudio Rocchetti is the seventeenth release of XONG collection – artist records. The release is on white vinyl, in a limited and numbered edition of 150 copies, including a collector’s edition of 20 copies, each accompanied by a keyhole of European and North American manufacture (from the 17th century till today) with the application of an original pen on canvas drawing by Silvia Costa.

Keyhole Mouth is the second collaboration, after Midnight Snack, between performer Silvia Costa and musician Claudio Rocchetti. Surrounded by objects and materials of different origins found by chance and arranged like sets, triggers for extemporaneous and fugitive narratives, Silvia Costa acted in the solitude and modesty of locked rooms, creating a series of unseen gestures and of which only a sonic memory remains. Barely audible excerpts of words, thoughts jotted down on a mental page, already forgotten and confused, mingle with the sound trails of actions, movements, steps, in a material and affective relationship with the most common objects.
A lighter, a rock, a newspaper. A chair, a pair of shoes, scissors.
Still lifes or enigmas to be deciphered. Claudio Rocchetti’s elaboration of these fragile and wild sounds gave rise to a concrete music, marked by compositional strategies that are based on the use of various sounds, vocalized, shouted, breathed, beaten, rubbed and recorded. Frequencies and dust from another world, to be heard without being heard, to be spied with the ears instead of the eyes, through the keyhole, without disturbing. This Keyhole is the crack, the mouth from which the sound comes. It is like a region of the space-time, isolated from the rest of the universe, that attracts you towards a dark and obscure centre where little is seen, much is imagined in listening.

Listen to excerpts

A:

Set 1     (6:32)
A chair, a balloon, a wooden brick, paper and scissors

Set 2     (12:18)
A ping pong ball, shells, metal rings

B:

Set 3    (9:21)
A chain, a pen, a piece of fabric, coins

Set 4     (3:16)
A table and a chair

Set 5    (7:45)
Stones, keys, an elastic, a lighter, a newspaper