Tobia Poltronieri — La Voce Della Padrona

In one sense, recording is ultimately an act of delayed intention, capturing something — an instrument, a voice, the sound of birds or someone snoring— with its future integration as a contingent part of some curated, imaginative whole, already a fait accompli. Out of this state of things, the duality of work and fragment is born: work, the telos of this process of suturing disparate threads together and the fragment its homeless stepchild. There are countless examples of studio work that fetishizes the cutting room floor, as it were, but very few that I know of that attempt what Tobia Poltronieri achieves on his 12-part, La Voce Della Padrona: to let the fragment remain fragmentary.

The album’s tracks are, with few exceptions, short and marvelously free of overworked, post-production nonsense. The archive in question is one the artist has been amassing over the last two decades, haunting and often without legible referent, an affinity with some of the creepy solo works that Norwegian noise pioneer Kjetil D Brandsdal was releasing around 1999 (Untitled on Ecstatic Peace and Rogalands Lydigste come to mind).

Unlike Brandsdal, the part-object in Poltronieri’s hand is a gentler beast. The final track, “La voce della padrona”, is downright mellifluous. I could swear there is a musical saw there, but no mention of one occurs in the liner notes,sadly. Poltronieri’s primary instrument is the guitar, and the lovely ambient composition, “Tropic of Dalston” parades his sensibilities and acumen, for the aforementioned suturing, while standing in pretty stark contrast to the rest of the album. It is the longest track and features none of the hard-edged collage found elsewhere. In describing the archive explored on La voce della padrona,the artist referred to the passages captured as “non-moments”. For once, an artist immune to grand gestures and the majestic whole!

Fans of field recordings, spacey passages which tend to stay right where they are. In addition to Brandsdal, some shared affinities with Mick Turner, Steve Gunn, and others. Highly recommend!