“What can we hear now? A sound, as though grains of sand trickle down onto a fine membrane….” This sound, as though grains of finest sand trickle onto a membrane–the last thing that the narrator in Stanislaw Lem’s “Solaris” hears when he starts out on his journey to a world that is falling apart–is the most fitting way to describe the characteristics of Luigi Archetti’s music NULL. Stylistically, the compositions can be placed within the field of planar tonal design, and with this, also an experimental treatment of static sounds and microtonality, out of which finally something like monolithic sound sculptures have emerged. Oscillating in filigree nuances, the modulation of a drone that seems to last an eternity alone indicates that the sense of real time has been canceled–while, at the same time, another acoustic track surfaces like a distant memory, only to disappear again. One begins to think that a sonorous world has come to a standstill or has been silenced. Soon, however, a sonic texture gradually begins to spread, scraps of sound seem familiar for a moment and already disappear again before one can grasp them; in the meantime the lower-frequency oscillations of the sound crawl under one’s skin in the form of vibrations. A feeling of strangeness and disconcertment becomes physical. With this the senses are automatically sharpened; all ears, one dives into a universe of sound, which is something different and more than what one can decipher acoustically. A universe of sound particles spreads out, in which the sounds provide no references to a possible location. What the ear might consider to be the crunching sound of snow crusts, the deep droning of ice breaking, the scraping of migrating glaciers is often merely an acoustic hallucination, while actually the sounds have been composed using the finest of sound particles, which Archetti’s ear has taken from completely different sources, such as the hum of generators, or the white noise of a blank video tape being played, or drone sounds created with the E-bow, which he extracts from his electric guitar (often with scordatura tuning). An intermediate realm is created in which acoustic sedimentations are layered into a sound tapestry so dense that it feels like there is almost no air left to breathe or to hear with anymore. But it also draws one in like an invitation to journey further into unexplored regions, a journey through timeless and spare acoustic events with a rivetingly hypnotic effect. (label info)