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.
I present my current artistic research and sound project under the moniker KTONIOS. In this research, I investigate music and collective musical performances as a tool of resistance, researching topics such as rave culture, the origin of Detroit techno music, Southern Italian traditional folk music, sonic fictions in music and the usage of sound as a call to action and an healing tool.