Review: Emiliano Romanelli - 333 Loops (Volume 1)

Technically this is Romanelli’s debut since his work with Tu m’ ceased back in 2011, but the connotations of debut feel somehow wrong; implying an opening statement, or the gateway into a path of re-evaluation and redevelopment. 333 Loops is already fully realised – it exists as every eventuality all at once, even if my senses are only exposed to one at a time – and given that Romanelli’s modular system works by juxtaposing a bank of 333 loops against eachother (creating a possible 11089 different live sound events), what I am hearing here is the finished sculpture under partial illumination, with each subsequent performance placing a different fragment under the light.

I hear bell tones of several pitches, melted down and swirled gently into one another; overtones poke above the syrup of nuzzling mid frequencies, as the piece tilts and reshapes, inflates and wilts. Later, noise thickens like vapour over hums that snake through the crust beneath my feet, as indistinct clangs suggest a construction project taking place somewhere within the trees. It’s like the flow of water filmed in slow motion – a chaos of intricacy rendered elegant, generating life through surges of deliberate, unforeseeable movements. There is no root from which the sound originates, and 333 Loops levitates above all notions of “correct” orientation and fixed beginnings. Appropriately for a piece that enters my sensory spectrum by permeating the wall of potential, I feel I’m entering something that has already begun, already finished; it is a becoming and a become, spinning me in the stasis of eternal motion, dissolving me into the shapeless unknown of transience.