Two versions: for bass clarinet and tape, and tape only. Selected for Matera Intermedia 2017.

8-channel Fixed media. Selected for MusLab Muestra Internacional de Música Electroacústica (Mexico City).

In 1925 Eugenio Montale published its most famous collection of poems, Ossi di seppia. The title means “Cuttlefish bones” and has always been strongly evocative for me: the inner essence of things, of reality itself, is presented here as a residual, a relic which survives the sea and arrives to the beach in the form of a white, levigated cuttlefish bone. This image is a powerful sum of existential reflections and sensorial recalls, which came back to me during the walks by the North Sea near my new hometown, The Hague, such a different-but-similar sea compared to the Italian one, which I knew since I was a child. Montale’s poems are full of sounds, like the “snakes rustle“, the “blackbirds catcall“, the “cicadas’ wavering screaks“ … a whole soundscape is presented to our ears through concrete, onomatopoeic words. For the electronic part, I decided to start from this poetic idea – Ossi di Seppia – and to work on pre-recorded material of bass clarinet sounds, processing them through spectral decomposition techniques, in order to extract the bones, the residuals, the relics of the original sounds. Starting from this concrete material, the piece has been developed into five sections, each inspired by a sonic image taken from Montale’s poems.