Alter Ego & Pan Sonic: Microwaves

Since many years Alter Ego has turned its attention to projects with artists coming from different musical experiences.

This relationship with the various musicians is a total one: not a mere migration among the different musical genres, a constant in these last years, but an osmosis that may exalt its artistic potentiality while increasing its capability of communication towards an audience more and more demanding and attentive.

In Microwaves the idea is to reverse the terms of a musical relation between the genre “cultured” and electronics “underground” through a complete synergy among the various artistic elements: a journey that starts from the recording material of one of the most interesting electronic groups of our days, Pan Sonic, and arrives, while updating itself, at the aesthetics of the composers belonging to the “cultured” area (Atli Ingolfsson, Yan Maresz, Giovanni Verrando, Riccardo Nova). The next step is to come back – a more ambitious challenge – to sender, that is to the Pan Sonic group, that in its turn rearranges the material, so completing the cycle. A kind of ring, or even better, an endless spiral that regenerates itself relentlessly.

Microwaves, the neologism devised by the magazine “Vital”, gives a name to the mass of unutterable sounds that in the second half of the nineties, from Pan Sonic on, submerged the world of the non commercial electronic music. Electronics created with sounds coming from unthinkable sources and transformed in a digital rhythm infinitesimally broken up and then recomposed by computer. The feeling one breathes is decidedly very near to the most minimalist techno music, but it turns out more and more eccentric: the sounds are so lyophilised and repeated through syncopation, jumps and noises that the result is the very negation of the dance.

To move the audience’s attention from the physical and passive fruition of dance music to a dynamic confrontation with the musical creation means to assert the dignity of listening, a lesson taken over by the pioneers of the electronic musical research during the fifties and sixties such as Stockhausen, Nono, Xenakis, Lucier. A remarkable revolution for us, accustomed to associate the electronic and rhythmic music to dance music tout court.

The project has been commissioned and co-produced by the New Music Festival in Stockholm, Berlin MaerzMusik, Festival Archipel of Geneva, Holland Festival in Amsterdam, Ircam in Paris and RomaEuropa Festival.

This concert is affectionately dedicated to the memory of Fausto Romitelli.