broaden the understanding of “form” to what we might call “active acoustic horizon” – ie the profile defined in the real space by the real time sonic process. You may call it an antivirtualist position, maybe antiillusionist. That admittedly contrasts with more trendy directions, nowadays. But that is good! I guess I am purseing a kind of heretical, and anyway autonomous, approach on technology.
sounds? Agostino di Scipio: I cannot recognize any purity in my work, if only for biographical reasons (on which I won’t touch here). Since long (I guess since Anton Webern, at least, beginning of 20th century), nobody can claim any kind of purity… Thank goodness! “High” and “low”, “serious” and “pop”, communicate, hybridize, overlap. At the same time, we can feel how liberating is any artwork vis a vis the technocratic ideology suffocating our lives, and hegemonic in the music and sound art worlds too. The variety of current developments is definitely interesting, and I tend to be omnivorous – but even then I tend to listen very very carefully … I mean, listen to sound to perceive the degree of freedom that the artist is able to carve out in doing his or her work. The sound always bear traces of the skill and autonomy with which an artist strives to operate. There are audible signs of how free he or she can be in his or her existence. It’s not a question of trendy currents, fashion, labels, movements. It’s a widespread problem, that you see both in ‘academic’ productions and research, and in productions claiming a more direct and emotional communicability. In the end, today both those lines, however different, are often very self-referential: the one is a stranger to the problem of communication because it feels that
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Marco Mancuso: Your experience with electronic technologies and digital noise is vast and multifaceted. We recognize those who complain about the ‘purity’ of their discipline before the onset of practical applications and the accessibility of home computer music, or are you more inclined to deal with the potential of integration? What in your opinion are the reasons for the contemporary complaint that digital music lacks communicability and feeling, as distinct from the tradition of concrete and electronic
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