Quiet, from the Latin quies, evokes a state of being still. In its verb form, quiet means to clear so that something can gradually come into focus. Kind Stranger by Amedeo Cappelletti is where quiet materializes in a more transient, even foreign, way. Each track takes a step back from noise, borne out of a slow return to music, a different pace, and a familiar place left behind for years.
Kind Stranger, released on Aurora Edition on July 24th, is about the strangeness of a return. Cappelletti's melodic scores work their way between faint noise and disquiet, and sonically muse upon the familiar. That is, when given enough time and distance, the familiar can become unrecognizable, demanding stillness to resituate oneself within it. The album began taking shape when Cappelletti performed at Aurora Edition at Silent Green, just after he had returned to music following a three-year hiatus. In one month, he wrote forty-five minutes of new material from scratch, followed by a period of intense composition. Then Cappelletti left Berlin after eight years and returned to the Tuscan countryside where he had grown up, back into slowness, away from a kind of noise that had defined Berlin.
The album develops as an atmosphere in the truest sense. Resampled voices, found sound, and years of sound design practice converge with one another as compositions form by overlapping texture with spatial depth. The work isn't fundamentally about silence or quiet, yet Kind Stranger cultivates a quietude that envelops the listener. The loudest moments on Cappelletti’s album form a unifying crescendo that runs through Kind Stranger; these brief intrusions disrupt the outpouring of flowing arrangements and create a sense of passage.
Vocal recordings made with Matthew Walsh and Sarah McInerney, collaborators Cappelletti met by chance (in an ice cream shop in Schöneberg, Berlin), appear throughout the album like a current. These collaborations helped shape the compositions on Kind Stranger during a residency at MONOM, Berlin's spatial sound institute. Several tracks emerged from a "musical graveyard", as Cappelletti puts it, working from discarded documentary scores and ideas he cherished and couldn’t let go of. Thematically, the record moves through digital addiction, fragmented attention, the comfort of destructive habits, and the grief of work done in the darkness. It serves as a way to quiet the noise. The title is the album's definitive gesture. Kind Stranger is an offering to whoever finds themselves here within the quiet, in this particular quality of sound between return and lingering.
