Recorded and composed between 2019 and 2020, Il Mare di Dirac [Dirac's Sea] is our first album. We have decided to dedicate it to Nikola Tesla and to all the brilliant minds of women and men who have contributed to the construction of contemporary physics in the past two centuries. Divided into six movements, each section – except the third – recalls the discoveries made by some of our favorite physicists – such as Ettore Majorana, Richard Feynman and Lise Meitner – led by Paul Dirac and his famous Mare/Sea.
This choice might seem pretentious, but in reality it gives back a small portion of our curious attitude towards the phenomena of the world and our way of understanding the main ingredients of our project: sound and light.
Vibrant curiosity continually pushes us to ask ourselves questions and even the idea behind our musical duo comes from some questions: how can electronic sound and light coexist? What are they made of?
Download our album here.
Track list:
01. 00’00’’ – 03’24’’ > Particelle di Majorana 02. 03’24’’ – 04’54’’ > Il mare di Dirac 03. 04’54’’ – 13’24’’ > Calcite, Onyx, Hawaii, Tabacco (380V) 04. 13’24’’ – 16’06’’ > Simmetrie 05. 16’06’’ – 18’33’’ > Lise Meitner 06. 18’33’’ – 21’28’’ > Positroni, elettroni e annichilazione 07. 21’28’’ – 24’54’’ > Integrale sui cammini
The thousand voices of electric current
Our memory goes back to the desire to relive and retrace the enthusiasm aroused by the first inventions capable of giving voice to light such as the Electrical Musical Tones (1895) by Alfred Graham – one of the first to use voltage control – or William Du Bois Duddell's Singing Arc.
In 1899, William Du Bois Duddell (1872-1917) was called by the administration of the English capital to solve the problem of noise pollution created by the arc lamps that lit up the streets of the city; Duddell realized that audible frequencies could be controlled by changing the voltage applied to the electrodes. Thus it was that one of the first electric musical instruments was born which did not even need external diffusion systems since the same voltaic arc of the lamps acted as a loudspeaker.
And so, in an era of great diffusion of instruments intended for the production of electronic music, we have chosen to concentrate our research on the original material of this discipline: the electric current.
We spend our lives surrounded by very useful electrical and electronic devices (Ed: whose principles were largely invented by Nikola Tesla…) which emit a constant and hardly audible sound. In a quiet room, we could perhaps hear the hum of some power supply or old malfunctioning neon, but the rest of the voices of our devices and the electric current flowing near us would still remain silent.
Our musical instruments
To hear and record the sound of the current we resort to the phenomenon of electromagnetic induction following a path already opened in the recent past in the history of experimentation by David Tudor and continued, among others, by the pioneer Christina Kubisch and the Serbian composer Jasna Velikovic.
Our musical instruments are not trivial microphones, but small devices that we have created (or that some colleagues and technicians have created for us) capable of amplifying the electromagnetic fields generated by electrical or electronic devices.
Each instrument responds to certain frequency ranges and each source (power supplies, electric lamps, televisions with cathode ray tubes, etc.) has a different sound, which varies from type to type and from brand to brand; even the "quality" of the current in a place and the weather conditions affect the final result. Finding the most imaginative or compositionally stimulating sounds is a daily adventure for us and the sounds we use can hardly be replicated in the same way.
These secret varieties prompted us to look for different sources: we amplified and listened to all the appliances we had at home, the sounds of the city (traffic lights, ATMs, burglar alarms…), the sounds of electric pylons, Christmas lights and even of a fabric factory, those the Bonotto textile company… but that's another story.
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