In one of his Vermilion Sands tales, J. G. Ballard imagined singing statues strewn across a desert, their voices eroding the air while the future quietly expired around them. Pillars feels like a dispatch from that same impossible landscape. Here, Francesca Flora’s voice is the only raw material, but it doesn’t behave like a conventional vocal performance. It arrives as residue and apparition - sighs, screams, hums, jingles, fractured phrases - torn from the body and reconfigured into something part-elegy, part-carnival of unease. These are songs after the idea of song has cracked, still vibrating against vast, unseen cliffs.
The entire work is composed through the mechanical re-elaboration of Flora’s vocal expression, with nobile operating less like a producer and more like a surgeon or necromancer. Every sound belongs, literally, to the arpeggio of a vocal cord; there are no external instruments to hide behind, only the minute inflections of breath, grain and pitch stretched into uncanny architectures. At one extreme, we hear intimate murmurs and inward-facing humming that feel almost too close, as if the microphone were lodged inside the throat. At the other, Flora’s voice fractures into shrieks, mechanical stutters and grotesque choruses, estranged from its origin yet still carrying the memory of a human source.
This tension between intimacy and dread is the core of Pillars. Each piece functions as a sorrowful, slightly hallucinatory musical tale, where the narrative is not carried by text but by the way sounds come back heavier than they left, thickened by echo and repetition. The voices seem to emerge from a time out of joint, brazen in their eeriness, inhabiting a space where reverberation doesn’t simply reflect but mutates, returning like a cavern that has learned to speak. What begins as a single breath may return as a choir; what starts as a fragile hum may twist into a grotesque jingle that feels both playful and deeply wrong.
The collaboration between Flora and nobile finds its common ground, as they themselves suggest, “below a gutter where the dark can unleash.” Flora, an artist, writer and performer based in Marseille, orbits the hinges of language and the human voice, treating them as affective realms that activate and cross-pollinate on their own terms. Her poetic-prosaic sensibility permeates the record even when words disintegrate, shaping the arc of each piece as a kind of vocal writing beyond semantics. Nobile (Matteo Nobile), musician and sound artist working out of Milan, brings a parallel concern with sound’s emotive landscape, tracing instinctive poetics through ambient passages, organic throbs and rhythmic textures, as heard in his 2024 tape Fantastico Interiore for OOH-sounds. On Pillars, their sensibilities interlock: her focus on voice as emotional language, his on sound as emotional terrain.
Crucially, this is not a retro gesture toward musique concrète or a dry exercise in extended vocal technique. The mechanical processes applied to Flora’s recordings are precise but never clinical; they keep the work suspended between rigorous electroacoustic composition and something rawer, closer to nightmare or fever dream. The “grotesque” in these musical tales is never simply grotesque for its own sake: it is the mask that reveals how much intimacy a voice can hold, and how unsettling it becomes once that intimacy is amplified, looped, or mechanically frozen mid-gesture. Each track feels like a pillar raising itself from the floor of a dark room - a vertical column of sound marking a point where the human and the inhuman briefly coincide.
