London’s Luciano Maggiore has been recording, and performing radical sound art for more than a decade now, both in inspired duo collaborations (with Francesco Brasini, Enrico Malatesta, and most recently Louie Rice) and as a solo artist. Focusing on radical repetition and generative playback of electronic sonorities stripped to their most basic essences, his ever-evolving explorations manifest in forms ranging from the microscopic yet lush glitch-storms of Intersezioni di Vortici, Studi Ritmici e False Chimere to the bewildering dream-logic groans of Locu to the soothing loop-based meditations of pietra e oggetto—no two releases sound the same, and self-talk, unsurprisingly, upholds that trend. The sparse aesthetic of this gorgeous trifold digipak from Maggiore’s own imprint Edizioni Luma is both playful and uncanny, evocations similar to that of fellow sonic minimalists Sukora and Arek Gulbenkoglu (see the covers of Ice Cream Day! Nice Day! and fissure, fissure, fissure, respectively), and its contents, the result of a year of research and composition, comprise some of his most basal material yet. Here, the slightest of dramas are soldered from as few as two or three textural currents, each orbiting and bouncing off one another in lethargic pseudo-rhythm like tiny particle systems hovering above absolute zero. (The passive voice there was not unintentional. These compositions seem just as algorithmic as they do written.) The first cut employs electrical sputters and pulses that interact with almost percussive resonance, while the second is all warbles and smears beset by a hiccupping bass frequency, and then the third sort of brings it all together… it’s hard to describe how self-talk feels both static and dynamic, but it does; not unlike wall, what you hear if you skip ahead to the fifteen-minute mark is not the same thing you hear if you actually listen to the fifteen-minute mark, if that makes any sense. Fascinating music that’s as exciting as it is elusive.
Noise Not Music 