KTONIOS is the moniker of Davide Ghelli Santuliana as a musician, sound artist and performer of improvised electronic music. He researches the traditional music of Southern Italy, in particular the styles known as "tammurriata" and "tarantella". He is interested in the magic-ritual tradition that surrounds these musical and dance performances and their collective elements, especially contrasting them with the cultural homogeneity, human fragmentation and individualism of late capitalism.
Acid Tarantism (2025)
Acid Tarantism is an improvised electronic music live set, presented with a quadraphonic setup surrounding the audience. The project is inspired by the ritual of tarantism - a music and dance possession ritual where a person "bitten" by a tarantula needs to expunge the venom - which is in fact a community ritual to support a person affected by mental strain. Tarantism stands in stark opposition to contemporary capitalism's idea that mental illnesses are an individual guilt. This prevents us from seeing the systemic elements at play in, for instance, depression or anxiety. In line with Mark Fisher's ideas expressed in "Acid Communism", this work reflects on the potential of electronic dance music as a communal space where to heal collectively and practice mutual care. The idea is to reach a state of trance through music and foster the movement of bodies in space through the choreography of sound in a quadraphonic setup.
The work has so far been presented at Time Window (Rotterdam), in March 2025, and has been supported by CBK Rotterdam and a crowdfunding campaign on Voordekunst.
Solarization (2024 - 2025)
Solarization: a process of inversion in analog film/photography, where colors are not only inverted, but the overexposure of film (an extreme brightness) is exaggerated, even resulting in turning the brightest spots (such as a sun) into black areas. It's a process where the unseen is made visible, where the documentary certainty of photography is questioned and overturned. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax during the 1950s set on a journey in Italy to record local folk music and in doing so, he encountered the ancient music rituals of Southern Italy. The lo-fi quality of his recordings, rather than resulting in a faithful and objective document, brought out an unheard reality: guttural sounds, funeral lamentations, wildly hectic frame drums, atonal and microtonal timbers or the weird, unsettling sounds of self-fabricated percussive instruments. Involuntary, Lomax rendered a solarized version of Southern Italian traditional folk, far from the contemporary "exoticized" rendition of this musical tradition. Technology - in this case, recording on a magnetic tape - proved a means to reveal the unheard and a magical, spectral quality of sound, similar to what photography does with solarization. My project Solarization takes inspiration from this research, translating it into sound art, performance and installation. For the last two years, I gathered archival materials taken mostly from ethnomusicological recordings of Southern Italian folk music (in particular from the area around the mount Vesuvius) and used them as the foundation of my improvised sound performance. Similar to what I pointed out with Lomax, I used technological devices to bring out unheard, otherworldly qualities of this music: using DIY software tools, modular synthesisers and other electronic instruments, I explore a different dimension of music - microscopic in the time domain (very short grains of pre-recorded sounds), microtonal (with very small tonal oscillations) and so forth. My work translates into an immersive audiovisual performance, where sound is paired with transfigured documentary images of folk music performances from Southern Italy, performed by audiovisual artist Cem Altinoz. The work has been presented during GRAW 2024 (Rotterdam), 4bid gallery/OT301 (Amsterdam) and GROND (Amsterdam), in 2024.
KTONIOS is the moniker of Davide Ghelli Santuliana as a musician, sound artist and performer of improvised electronic music. He researches the traditional music of Southern Italy, in particular the styles known as "tammurriata" and "tarantella". He is interested in the magic-ritual tradition that surrounds these musical and dance performances and their collective elements, especially contrasting them with the cultural homogeneity, human fragmentation and individualism of late capitalism.
Acid Tarantism (2025)
Acid Tarantism is an improvised electronic music live set, presented with a quadraphonic setup surrounding the audience. The project is inspired by the ritual of tarantism - a music and dance possession ritual where a person "bitten" by a tarantula needs to expunge the venom - which is in fact a community ritual to support a person affected by mental strain. Tarantism stands in stark opposition to contemporary capitalism's idea that mental illnesses are an individual guilt. This prevents us from seeing the systemic elements at play in, for instance, depression or anxiety. In line with Mark Fisher's ideas expressed in "Acid Communism", this work reflects on the potential of electronic dance music as a communal space where to heal collectively and practice mutual care. The idea is to reach a state of trance through music and foster the movement of bodies in space through the choreography of sound in a quadraphonic setup.
The work has so far been presented at Time Window (Rotterdam), in March 2025, and has been supported by CBK Rotterdam and a crowdfunding campaign on Voordekunst.
Solarization (2024 - 2025)
Solarization: a process of inversion in analog film/photography, where colors are not only inverted, but the overexposure of film (an extreme brightness) is exaggerated, even resulting in turning the brightest spots (such as a sun) into black areas. It's a process where the unseen is made visible, where the documentary certainty of photography is questioned and overturned. Ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax during the 1950s set on a journey in Italy to record local folk music and in doing so, he encountered the ancient music rituals of Southern Italy. The lo-fi quality of his recordings, rather than resulting in a faithful and objective document, brought out an unheard reality: guttural sounds, funeral lamentations, wildly hectic frame drums, atonal and microtonal timbers or the weird, unsettling sounds of self-fabricated percussive instruments. Involuntary, Lomax rendered a solarized version of Southern Italian traditional folk, far from the contemporary "exoticized" rendition of this musical tradition. Technology - in this case, recording on a magnetic tape - proved a means to reveal the unheard and a magical, spectral quality of sound, similar to what photography does with solarization. My project Solarization takes inspiration from this research, translating it into sound art, performance and installation. For the last two years, I gathered archival materials taken mostly from ethnomusicological recordings of Southern Italian folk music (in particular from the area around the mount Vesuvius) and used them as the foundation of my improvised sound performance. Similar to what I pointed out with Lomax, I used technological devices to bring out unheard, otherworldly qualities of this music: using DIY software tools, modular synthesisers and other electronic instruments, I explore a different dimension of music - microscopic in the time domain (very short grains of pre-recorded sounds), microtonal (with very small tonal oscillations) and so forth. My work translates into an immersive audiovisual performance, where sound is paired with transfigured documentary images of folk music performances from Southern Italy, performed by audiovisual artist Cem Altinoz. The work has been presented during GRAW 2024 (Rotterdam), 4bid gallery/OT301 (Amsterdam) and GROND (Amsterdam), in 2024.