** Edition of 80 copies. LP + Artist’s Signed Drawing "Aura" and "Bagatelle", "Continuum", "Pieghe", "Matinèe" and "Note" Artworks. ** Mise presents itself as an archival scandal in slow motion. During renovation work at Villa Asperina, via Cantocchi 12, a cache of papers and autograph scores surfaces: sketches, fragments and notes that look and feel like compositions in progress, but whose author refuses to materialise. There are hints - scattered correspondence, allusions in texts, testimonies of appearances at events and happenings, traces of collaborations with prominent figures in music and art - yet the person behind them remains carefully, almost obsessively veiled. Whoever this composer is, they have always curated their public image with extreme care, defending strict privacy and maintaining a radical detachment from any official scene. Their rare emergences coincide only with complex, transversal events, the sort of projects that blur the lines between performance, installation, literature and sound, then vanish again without explanation.

Faced with this enigmatic pile of material and the impossibility of securing any kind of authorization, the production team chooses not to seal the box back up but to assume full responsibility for opening it. Mise is that risky gesture: the decision to give maximum visibility to the stack of notes by commissioning a rigorous interpretation and piano performance, fully aware of the ethical, artistic and legal irregularities such a move might entail. The interpreters are not random virtuosi but musicians already familiar with the composer’s supposed artistic and creative heritage, steeped in the language and obsessions that surface in the documents. Around the scores themselves, the team compiles a dense repertoire of commentaries, digressions and auxiliary “paper‑notes‑scores”, written in continuity with the style, habits and needs that emerge from those few official, authorised publications that can be linked to the elusive figure.

The result of this “archaeological” journey is a box set that does not pretend to be definitive. Instead, it openly proposes itself as a partial incursion into an unfinished composition, an attempt to sketch some of the possible aesthetic and artistic branches that might extend from the work and world of Andrea Firewell. That name hovers over the project like a hypothesis, a placeholder for a persona that may be as constructed as it is recovered. The piano pieces move between fidelity to the surviving sketches and freer extrapolation, embodying the tension between respect for an absent author and the creative necessity of completing, amplifying, sometimes contradicting what the notes seem to propose. The box set acknowledges its own status as reconstruction and projection, an act of “mise en scène” as much as “mise en ordre”.

Conceived by Lisa Baume, Dao Duc, Martina Gre and Francesco Trabattoni, Mise folds sound, text and image into one polyphonic object. Baume and Alima Zada contribute texts that double and comment on the musical operation, while paintings, photographs and drawings by Baume, Gre and Trabattoni extend the imagined archive into a visual field. Travel companion Isabella Mazza marks the project’s itinerant, exploratory character, as if the team were moving through Firewell’s ghostly territory rather than cataloguing it from a distance. The recordings, mixed by Fabio Intraina and Trabattoni, are given a close, tactile presence, preserving the grain of the piano and the ambient noises that ring around it. In the end, Mise is less about solving the mystery of an anonymous composer than about inhabiting that mystery: an experiment in how far a group of artists can go in reconstructing a voice that may never quite want to be found.