Lucio Capece, a musician from Argentina, has lived in Berlin since 2004. He trained as a classical and jazz musician, in Buenos Aires, Lyons and New York (where he studied with Marilyn Crispell, Gerry Hemingway and Tim Berne, among others). Since 2000, he has been involved with electroacoustic improvisation, 'preparing' his wind instruments (clarinet, soprano sax and Sruti Box) and applying techniques and extensions of his own invention. These instrumental devices allow him to create simple polyphonies, based on noises and sounds, which emphasize a holistic approach to listening. He then goes on to further reduce the use of instruments, focusing on harmonics and microtonalities, maintaining some attention to the acoustic properties of the spaces that host his concerts. Conditional Music is a more thorough examination of precisely this approach, performed in its first version in the cathedral of Bern in October 2012, a module that intends to create a deep listening experience using spectralistic and psychoacoustic techniques. Capece directed a sound-lights-acusmatic project at the Bauhaus Archive, Berlin, in 2007, performing with the Light-Space Modulator, the legendary kinetic sculpture built by László Moholy-Nagy in 1922-1930. His joint projects and audio co-productions include collaborations in recent years with Mika Vainio, Toshimaru Nakamura, Axel Dorner, Kevin Drumm, Robin Hayward, Rhodri Davies, Burkhard Beins, Mattin, Julia Eckhardt, Franz Hautzinger, Domenico Sciajno, Radu Malfatti, Keith Rowe, Taku Sugimoto, Sean Meehan. He has also performed in projects by Phill Niblock, Christian Wolff and Pauline Oliveros, and in the Q-O2 Ensemble.
sound performance, première
for flying speakers, balloons filled with helium, sine waves, recording of the performance SPACE with microphones inside cardboard tubes, tune bugs, cardboard boxes, PA, soprano saxophone
by and with Lucio Capece
guests Luciano Maggiore, Enrico Malatesta, Dominique Vaccaro, Riccardo Baruzzi
production Xing/Live Arts Week
MAMbo ben temperato (Well-tempered MAMbo) is the title of the new sound performance by Lucio Capece, created for Live Arts Week, as an evolution of the project Conditional Music. Using a set of sound recordings made in the MAMbo spaces with microphones, as starting material, Capece selects a repertoire of pitches. This collection forms a compositional base that lies between a long tonal melody and a changing drone, performed using a three-speaker sound system in three balloons in the air, with varied vertical positions. The final result is added a second set of sounds, obtained live through the same miking system. This doubling of simultaneous sound sources, delayed in time starting from the same acoustic space, arises from a specific intent to investigate the phenomenology of perception. As Capece himself says, "Everything around us tends to confirm the existence of the concepts of how we perceive that everything. The approach we have towards our environment makes us relate to it as if we had our feet planted in a 'State of Real' that we accept as the ground on which we base our perception system." With MAMbo ben temperato Capece offers a unified space of ground and figure where music becomes then an enjoyable tool to listen to how we listen, to perceive how we perceive. A space in perennial transformation, where every detail is a fundamental part of a whole.