Luigi Marino

Luigi Marino's I See My Unconscious Body Breathing is a single piece of just over 51 minutes for four Wuhan cymbals, played with bows and nothing else. No electronic sounds are used and nothing is amplified, so the work could be performed live exactly as it is heard here.

Marino found the four cymbals in San Francisco's Chinatown in 2009 and has spent some fifteen years building a vocabulary of acoustic techniques for them, mostly with a single bow, at times with two bows on the same cymbal. The piece was recorded in Bristol between February and April 2026. Its time comes from the body. A recording of the composer's own breathing while asleep runs through the whole work, and the bow strokes of the four parts follow its inhalations and exhalations, or divide them further. The pitches come from the metal: over the years Marino mapped the partials and multiphonics of each cymbal, and code he developed together with a language model found just-intonation relationships between the four that he had missed, which stretched the work from under half an hour to more than fifty minutes. Some episodes follow his ear, others follow those calculated intervals, such as a septimal whole tone held for exactly 13 breaths. In his liner text Marino reads the piece against American experimentalism and against the example of Roscoe Mitchell, whose long passages of circular breathing he cites as a lesson in keeping attention alive over time.

Limited edition cassette on Dinzu Artefacts, released October 30th 2026, cover photograph by Joe McKay.