Sleep Together Folded Like Origami is an embrace of electronic and post-rock music. Out today May 6th, 2022 in digital and limited edition CD via Bosco Rec, the first solo album by Francesco Lurgo, formerly of FLeUR, envelops the listener in melodies that reveal their elegant intensity and in cinematic environmental textures. According to the Italian musician and producer: “I wanted to make a record that explores and celebrates intimacy, the one experienced during the lockdown period. There are no words in these tracks, but the atmospheres reflected my feelings in a universal way“.
The themes evoked by the tracks are also reflected by the artwork, with a drawing by Aurora Bertoli, and by the title of the record, a paraphrase of an excerpt from the novel Conversations With Friends by the Irish writer Sally Rooney, admired for her ability “to combine a narrative of everyday life and profound, almost philosophical considerations“. The embrace of Sleep Together Folded Like Origami is linked to the nocturnal dimension, to the realm of sleep and dreams. Lurgo continues: “Many of the countless replayings of the tracks occurred in the moment before sleeping, when I feel that the mind is completely free to travel, and this is a further reason behind the choice of the artwork and the title of the record. I was not surprised to read an interview with Adam Wiltzie of Stars Of The Lid and A Winged Victory For The Sullen in which he stated: ‘if I can’t fall asleep listening to my track again, it means that this track is not good’ “. In addition to Stars Of The Lid, Lurgo’s inspirations have been Ben Frost – in particular, his soundtrack for the television series Dark – and Tim Hecker, Teho Teardo, Labradford and Godspeed You! Black Emperor.
This solo debut after the adventure in the duo FLeUR, last year at their second album Caring About Something Utterly Useless, allowed a total control over the artistic vision and a coherent work, connected to the influence of natural landscapes, starting from the open countryside environment that framed Lurgo’s lockdown isolation, as well to a certain sense of imaginary narration, legacy of the theatrical collaborations. During the work in progress, Lurgo kept in constant dialogue with Emilio Pozzolini (port-royal, Earth Begins) and continues his research applied to the combination of electronics, floating between dark ambient and modern classical, and the human warmth of the hands playing guitars and keyboards. The main novelty is represented by the insertion of strings, specifically the viola played by Erika Giansanti, for a minimal and ethereal sonic magma, with great emotional dynamics. “The guitar is the instrument with which I seriously approached music years ago and it is still the palette I use to write the first forms of many melodies and chord progressions. On the other side, I have used the strings here for the first time, but I have always loved the sound of the solo string instrument, so I agree with one of the artists I respect most, Björk, when she says that ‘if you could amplify our soul, perhaps it would make the sound of a string instrument“. The most appropriate adjective to describe the sound of Sleep Together Folded Like Origami, in short, is “organic”. “I wanted to completely overcome the dichotomy and the contrast between the sharp character of digital sound and the softer one guaranteed by physical instruments, blurring these boundaries to achieve an homogeneus flow“.
The title track Sleep Together Folded Like Origami, extracted as first single, was born in the spring of 2020, almost as if it were a sound meditation on the lockdown, and triggered the creation of the full album. There is a sense of stasis, under which emotionality presses and tries to emerge. The related video was shot directly by Lurgo, also a professional filmmaker: “A synaesthetic approach is inevitable: in my head every sound is always associated with colors and visual representations that influence compositional and sound design choices. I think that my activity as a musician and my work as a film-maker are in synergy“. Lurgo found an abandoned house in ruins and entered it with his video camera: “The scenario matched perfectly with the mood of the track, but above all matched with this peculiar historical moment. I decided to reintroduce the human presence with the final image, where I appear in first person, which served as the starting point for the artwork and recalls all the concepts expressed by the title of the record“.
If Sleep Together Folded Like Origami is the opening track that set the tone for the work, the second single One Moment After The Shipwreck was the last to be composed and is also the last in the tracklist. “The video is a free adaptation of a passage from Conversations With Friendsby Sally Rooney, the same book from which I took the title of the album. From the first time I read this passage, I wanted to transpose it into a video and, when I finished One Moment After The Shipwreck, I thought the track might have the ideal obsessiveness and sound pressure to support the thoughts of the main character, played by Giulia Maino, who in the pain caused by endometriosis from which she suffers, takes refuge in a church and indulges in extremely deep thoughts before passing out“. So, One Moment After The Shipwreck closes a circle that goes from the most delicate and fragile track to the one with the most dirty timbres and rich in distortions, while maintaining the ethereal and ritual suspension that marks the whole album.
