During the second wave of lockdowns and cultural stop spread all around Europe in late 2020, bb15 invited sound artist Michele Spanghero in a process of “remote residency” for the creation of a compositional work dealing with silence and the emptyness of the cultural spaces.
Over the course of his Remote Residency Michele Spanghero created a second work by engaging with the sound qualities of the empty space of bb15, entitled Loopdown and now available as tape loop cassettes.
The work is grounded on the pressing feeling of looping of time during pandemic: a feeling of non-evolving solitude and melancholy that most of the people recently experienced during lockdowns.
Inspired by Erik Satie’s musique d’ameublement – furniture music – Spanghero created a looping sound composition based on a short piano sequence, which repeats unchanged and yet evolves through texture and time variations. The work is also the result of a process of remote-recording with the help of the bb15 team, through which natural reverberation and resonancies of the bb15’s venue were experienced from distance.
The second outcome of the Residency is a limited series of loop tape cassettes, a medium that itself does not have a beginning or an end, but only allows the listener to experience the composition spanning over time with the impression of movement or variations, but always returning to the basic piano sequence.
The 10 minutes loop tapes are released by bb15 in a limited edition of 20 cassettes and can be orderd here:
https://bb15.bandcamp.com/album/loopdown
Michele Spanghero (Gorizia, Italy 1979) sound and visual artist
Michele Spanghero’s artistic activity ranges from the field of sound art, to sculpture and photography. He’s research is versatile, yet consistent enough to receive the mention as “Best young Italian artist in 2016” according to Artribune magazine. Spanghero exhibited his works in various international venues such as School of the Art Institute (Chicago), Hyundai Motorstudio (Beijing), Tuileries Garden (Paris), Museum of Modern Art (Istanbul), Ars Electronica festival (Linz), Klangraum (Krems), Mart Museum (Rovereto), Bevilacqua La Masa Foundation (Venice), Palazzo Te (Mantua) and 16th Art Quadriennale (Rome).
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