Slowth Records is an independent Italian record label founded in 2020 in Bologna by musicians and composers Mattia Loris Siboni, Matteo Pastorello and Niccolò Salvi. Their artistic activity develops in various creative fields, including that of improvisation also developed as members of Minus – Collettivo d’Improvvisazione. Slowth Records deals with spreading and promoting experimental music and is born from the need to provide resonance to new musical expressions through multiple channels of transmission. The label is ready to welcome any musician who is dedicated to personal or group musical research, through improvisation, acousmatic composition, electroacoustics, video art, traditional, vocal or instrumental composition and any other genre difficult to categorize. All this is pursued with distribution on digital channels and hybrid communication, made up of traditional tools and social media. The sloth, chosen as key figure for the label logo, does not embody the spirit of our very fast times but firmly opposes it inviting people to listen very carefully. That’s why the name of the label is a simple pun between the words “sloth” and “slow”.
BolognaSound Vol. 1 is the first release by Slowth Records, available on all digital platforms from today 18 December 2020. It’s a compilation of five unreleased tracks that sheds light on the new experimental electronic scene of the city of Bologna. The musicians involved are the electronic duo Njordzitrone, the composer, musician and performer Federico Pipia, the composer, improviser and DJ Daniele Carcassi, the musician, composer and visual artist Marco Menditto and the musician, composer and improviser Simone Faraci.
But what exactly is this BolognaSound? The definition was coined by Francesco Giomi, composer and sound director, collaborator of Luciano Berio among others, director of the historic Tempo Reale music research, production and teaching center in Florence and professor of Electroacoustic Music Composition at the Bologna Conservatory of Music. Here is the presentation he wrote himself: «Bologna is today a city of great musical vitality, especially in sound research, electronic experimentation, and all those expressions that pass conventional canons. BolognaSound has developed and spread through this fertile ground of city culture, but it has been generated starting from the academic field: a fundamental role in the last fifteen years has been played by the School of Electronic Music of Conservatory “G. B. Martini”, able to build an idea of music made of depth, practice, openness and network of relationships. BolognaSound, however, is not a current or an artistic collective, but it’s a common way of understanding musical thought, despite the diversity of expressions, qualities and approaches. If it were possible to make a sort of manifesto, it can be summarized in five points: BolognaSound draws from the best Anglo-French acousmatic tradition (that one of Parmegiani, Smalley and Wishart), obtaining the possibility of control and morphological construction of the sound, as well as the evocative and investigative capacities about space; it incorporates germs from techno and noise expressions, recognizing their value both in the cultural sphere and in the purely sonological one; it constantly updates its traits of energy, power and freshness both in the context of recorded music and live music; it synthesizes the relationship between formal structure and improvisation thanks to a historical-analytical awareness and to a management of making music free of superficial attitudes; it looks at an international approach comparing itself with leading experiences in extra-Italian research. Thanks to all these characteristics, BolognaSound joins many new ferments of electronic music that is emerging in Europe, Canada, Asia and that, in this moment of static affirmation of mainstream languages, represent an element of great interest and hope for people involved in musical research. This record is a significant example of BolognaSound, gathering a plurality of interesting creative artists, from the most mature composers (such as Faraci and Carcassi) to young musicians whose musical energy seems to be just beginning (Pipia and Menditto), passing through communion of expressions that only Njordzitrone seems to embody in a perfect way».
