A sun inside a tunnel
Our planet is
divided in meridians and parallels. Maybe nobody has alerted you but along the
Parallel 41 there’s an artistic land, a place where all doors are there just to
be open and all its windows give us a mental white canvas which needs a completely free imagination to become a multi sensorial experience.. Parallel
41 is a place to play with sounds and lights, colours and tunes, a place to
listen, a place to talk. If you go into this parallel, you will find the
cellist and composer Julia Kent, the voice and the field recordings of Barbara
De Dominicis, and the visual art of Davide Lonardi. They are Parallel 41, in
their own words “Parallel41 does not
exist. It is a broken line....never drawn all the way but only thought,
dreamt, perhaps like in a mountebank's dream maintaining a precarious
balance on a chimerical wire...-lived and forgotten-.”
Fruit of the
collaboration between these artists an album of improvisation music was born,
working along the imaginary line that links Naples with New York. Of course,
that multi sensorial experience has given also light to a story in images
through a framework in which they were always looking for interesting places to
record. All those images are now embodied in the film Faraway close by Davide Lonardi which has become the story of the
musical journey and a part of the reflection of the band about space and time
as relative concepts. In that creative musical trip, they used cello, pedals, voice
and images, but mainly the casuality and the inspiration given by the different
places, deeply present especially in the field recordings. The found sounds
interact with the cello and some toys, giving the idea of playing to create a
main role in that process. Farms, abandoned tunnels, factories and creativity
are mixed in a project ready to take you far away.
First, they
invite us to Une journée d’un sud sans
soleil / A day of a south without sun. We hear voices in a crowded street
and then Julia Kent’s cello sounds like a sign of hope. But suddenly the cello
goes to a painful tune and Barbara de Dominicis sings while gets into a world
that seems being falling down. The naked
city is an surrounding cello with an almost whispered voice, close to your
ears, while different rhythms are floating around and sounds falling down like
rain drops. A Voiceless laughter comes
along with a Julia Kent’s pizzicato and the fragility of the voice of Barbara
and goes to some echoes with the cello sailing a melancholic sound sea. What
are the Eyes of eyes? That question
is an anguishing mantra. They bring us the Eyes of eyes which are not only the
title of one of the tracks on the album but the eyes, the ears and the hands
through which we can discover new minds, new sights, new senses. In definitive,
new ways of experiencing life.
FARAWAY SO CLOSE trailer here
JULIA KENT | CROSS WORLDS an interview in NAU NUA here
Text by Juan Carlos Romero
Parallel 41 website www.par4llel.org
Image courtesy of Parallel 41
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