PILIA, STEFANO - Spiralis Aurea

"First emerging during the early 2000s, over the past two decades -- via solo releases and numerous collaborations with artists like Oren Ambarchi, Valerio Tricoli, Alessandra Novaga, and numerous others -- Stefano Pilia has presented a singular voice within Italian experimental music. Spiralis Aurea, his third solo release with Die Schachtel, encounters the composer venturing into unchartered waters, exploring notions of spirituality via a body of twelve compositions, recorded in various combinations with a cast of all-star instrumentalists; Alessandra Novaga, iosonouncane, Silvia Tarozzi, Mattia Cipolli, Ensemble Concordanze, Elisa Bognetti, Enrico Gabrielli, Valeria Sturba, Giuseppe Franchellucci, Adrian Utley, and Cecilia Stacchiotti. The roots of Spiralis Aurea rest within Pilia's longstanding, personal engagement with the spiritual and an epiphany had during a visit to the Futa Pass cemetery, the resting place for German soldiers killed in Italy during the Second World War. Stepping back from the intuitive immediacy that guided his work for decades, and inspired by the concepts of "divine geometry", he set out to translate a series of numerical relationships and geometric figures into "sacred" musical forms. Drawing its title from the Golden Spiral, a mathematical formula and geometric form that has maintained both mystical and creative significance for millennia, each of the 12 works that comprise Spiralis Aurea began with a figure or process that is both geometric and symbolic, drawn by Pilia, that slowly translated into tangible organizations of sound. In some cases, such as the three movements of the "CodeXIII" series and "Crux", this process transformed numerical relationships derived from the Fibonacci sequence -- the underpinning of the "Golden Spiral" -- into harmonic progressions, while others take on more iconic and culturally familiar forms. "Ouroboros" alludes to an ancient symbol of a serpent consuming its own tail, deploying a contrapuntal process within which the beginning and end coincide. "Hannah", on the other hand -- deriving from the Hebrew word for "grace" -- is slightly more abstract, doubling its literal meaning against the palindromic qualities of the word, both aspects being reflected within the structural symmetry of the score. Pilia's Spiralis Aurea culminates as a series of sonic meditations, leaving room within their spacious forms to encourage active listening. Calling up echoes of ancient musics within their optimistic, forward-thinking tones, across various arrangements of instrumentation, Pilia sculpts a striking intersection between acoustic and electroacoustic process, drone, and chamber music. 180 gram vinyl; six-panel gatefold cover; includes booklet; edition of 190." - Die Schachtel.