Adriano Zanni
Adriano Zanni - credit: Adriano Zanni
Adriano Zanni, formerly known with the moniker Punck, is a sound artist and an appreciated photographer of the Romagna area. He has collaborated with various European record labels and his works have been shown at contemporary art exhibitions. His field recordings are sound memory, while his camera is often focused on trees, better if solitary trees. His new album is "Ricordo quasi tutto", out on 8 March 2019 for Bronson Recordings.
“The trees that this time become woods symbolize a dense cluster of memories and thoughts, those behind the idea of the new record. Trees are also a way to ideally connect a common path to all my latest works”. The trees mentioned by Adriano Zanni, sound artist and esteemed photographer of the Romagna landscapes, are those portrayed in the cover pic of his new album, Ricordo quasi tutto, out for Bronson Recordings, Bronson Produzioni label.
Previously active with the moniker Punck (from 2002 to 2008 in which came out Piallassa, a homage to Michelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert), after being involved in some improvisational ensembles and after almost a decade of silence, Zanni undertook a more personal direction releasing with his own name, in 2017, the 7” Falling Apart, the tape Soundtrack For Falling Trees – out for Bronson Recordings and accompanied by a self-produced photo book, soon printed in collaboration with the same Bronson Recordings and Boring Machines – and the LP Disappearing, followed in December 2018 by Siamo quasi tenebra, inspired by Iceland and Jón Kalman Stefánsson’s book Heaven and Hell.
He went through electro-acoustic and ambient music. It’s said the he “sounds the landscape”, but in Ricordo quasi tutto all the field recordings are not only a documentation but also a sound memory. Zanni does everything on his own, playing field recordings, analog ad digital instruments. “The album was recorded in the summer of 2018, when I was facing health problems that forced me to an isolation. The memories, to which I had access thanks to field recordings captured in the last four or five years, were a sort of escape and a return to life. There are happy moments: simple walks on the beach, bonfires, summer thunderstorms or images of the little Linosa island where the young boys of the church band tried to play The Final Countdown for the village party. Or there are less happy memories, like those connected to the cars that cross the highway between Ravenna and Bologna, which I have traveled several times a week to go to the hospital”. The heart of the tracklist, consisting of seven tracks (the eighth is a ghost track), is probably represented by Onde sinusoidali, esplosioni e inutili ricordi: “During the hospitalization I had brought a small synth OP1 and my headphones, so I manipuleted sine waves creating various presets for the tracks that I have later completed. The isolation for the recordings of the album happened instead in my house by the sea, in Marina Romea: one night, on the beach, I recorded the fireworks. In my childhood fireworks took traditionally place August 15th in Marina di Ravenna and symbolized the end of the summer, a real watershed”. This is an advice: listen to the sounds.
