Novellino + Rosi + Mazurek + Barnes - Objects In Mirror Are Closer Than They Appear

The basis of Objects In Mirror… is a set of field recordings made by Rosi and Novellino at Lanificio Leo: an active woollen mill founded back in 1873 in Calabria, Italy. The mill appears to me like an unmade jigsaw puzzle, with isolated portions of mechanism (collisions between weathered metal and slack old cord, ungainly rotary motion, blocks of wood dropping upon a hard floor) scattered between blotches of abstraction (electronics glitching like half-broken laser displays, noise misshapen and distorted as though played on a busted VHS cassette, Rob Mazurek’s wistfully oblivious babbling cornet). As a listening experience, it’s a daisy chain of jolt and contrast. One second I’m squinting at a synthesiser tone that tries to communicate in flashbulb pulses, the next I’m tasting dry flint and running rubble directly across my teeth. Sound is both a solid material and a shapeless trail of thought.

I take two very separate listens. One to swipe at individual details like a butterfly catcher, the other to feel my place within the architecture of the pieces as a whole. During the second instance, I think of those films where space shuttle cockpits start flashing and wail in a myriad of urgent patterns, alerting me to an emergency that I don’t understand. At other points I’m at the foot of a strange corridor, with walls bulging and disappearing without warning, or plummeting through holes that occur when a slight scuff of electronic glitch starts to rip and worsen. I run my fingers across surfaces that comprise of thousands of little bumps eroded cymbals, warm patches of drone carpet, globules of chalk and well-rusted metal plates. The places are both real and dreamlike; loaded with history and devoid of history, drawing attention to time decay while craftily turning the clocks back and forth when I’m not looking.