CASA BASE is a multimedia project that includes a series of video improvisations and a record tout today June 18th, 2021 by Slowth Records. The concept of the project is a game piece, a controlled improvisation system for remote playing musicians, inspired by the game of baseball. The system is the result of the research of the musicians of Minus.
The idea was born in the condition of not being able to play together and the desire to still find a way to do it. The sport of baseball has provided inspiration thinking about the organization of space: on the baseball field all the players are very distant from each other and there is only one ball connecting them, which travels from one to the other. This condition is similar to that of musicians who took part in remote concerts during pandemic months, forced to launch musical ideas into the air in the form of digital data. Then there is another aspect of baseball that has influenced the composition of this system and that concerns the concept of synchrony. In baseball, the relationship between the pitcher and the hitter is a perverse duel, where the hitter is looking for a synchronicity that is almost impossible to achieve. If he wants to hit the ball, he has to adjust his instinct to the travel time it takes to reach it: his survival in the game depends on the instinctive calculation of this latency.
In each of the four videos of the audiovisual series CASA BASE, two musicians from the Italian collective are remotely engaged in the search for synchrony. Playing at a distance places them in front of the great limit of latency: the sound, traveling from one musician to another through the network, must necessarily take time, making it difficult to voluntarily produce a perfect synchrony of sound events. The musicians seek an almost telepathic connection that comes from the experience of playing together, but above all from the search for a level of deep listening.
The four videos of the audiovisual series correspond to four different improvisation sessions, in which seven musicians from the collective – Daniele Carcassi, Simone Faraci, Giovanni Magaglio, Matteo Pastorello, Federico Pipia, Niccolò Salvi, Mattia Loris Siboni – plus the guest Biagio Cavallo are organized in four duos.
Unlike ROUND, the first Minus album released in 2020 with various acoustic and electric instruments, in CASA BASE there is an apparent uniformity of the instrumentation, almost entirely electronic. But the four sessions are characterized by different sounds: from the sci-fi ones of CASA BASE # 1 to the electro-acoustic influences of CASA BASE # 2, from the ordered polyrhythm of CASA BASE # 3 to the electronic punk of CASA BASE # 4.
The videos are now available on the YouTube channels of Slowth Records and Minus. The record collects short versions and alternate takes from the four sessions, plus a remix by Mattia Loris Siboni made with tracks from all the sessions, in a further attempt to eliminate the distance between musicians.
