When he plays live, Valerio Tricoli’s beanpole frame is concealed behind a bank of plugged-in hardware: multiple tape machines, loudspeakers and microphones wired through mixing apparatus that allows Tricoli to process, filter and shape sound
as it whistles past his ears, all his toil and trouble making the sound bubble.
Miseri Lares (‘Wretched House’) is Tricoli’s most eloquent and fully formed work to date on record, and anyone curious about where seeds sown by musique concrète pioneers such as Pierre Henry and Bernard Parmegiani during the early 1950s have left music today will find answers aplenty here. The difference between Tricoli – born in Palermo in 1977 and now living in Berlin – and those studio-bound first-generation composers is that music, for him, has remained a performative activity. Pumping etched-in-stone musique concrète through speakers into concert halls is not enough. This composer also improvises; he designs sound installations too; and believes that musical material ought to be transformed by the environment and acoustics into which it is placed.

The environment into which Miseri Lares unfolded was a recording studio but this music retains the spontaneity, the mutation of movement through space, familiar from Tricoli’s live performances. Issued over two LPs or for download, the piece sprawls over an 80-minute span and you emerge from the experience exhilarated and with your limits challenged. The 18-minute opening section, ‘La distanza’, with sustained high-pitch hollering resulting in a dramatic point of collapse from which recovery means negotiating your way through a shattered e scape populated by abrupt outbreaks of jagged, volatile scraping and sonic blasts, sets an ominous tone and dystopian mood.

Tricoli uses structure shrewdly. ‘La distanza’ is shot from a wide-angle perspective. But the next section, ‘Hic labor ille domus et inextricabilis error’, pares down to an intimate scale: ricocheting variations of a single tone that crescendos itself out of existence. When silences suddenly start to punctuate during ‘In the eye of the cyclone’ it’s a shock; and as human voices become woven ever deeper into the grain where words fragment into texture, the sense of eavesdropping on a horror that is unspoken intensifies.