Building on the remarkable ground cultivated by its first six releases by Vértice, Stefano Pilia, Sandro Mussida, Giovanni Di Domenico, and Claudio Rocchetti, Die Schachtel's Decay Music series returns with its seventh and eighth instalments, Paolo Spaccamonti’s “Ifigenia/Oreste” and “I hate all the words”, by Luca Scarabelli and Michele Lombardelli’s Untitled Noise. Furthering the imprint’s explorations of inspired contemporary experimental efforts in the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract, each of these brilliant offerings entirely rethinks the possibilities of ambient music in radically different ways, offering further proof that the future of the idiom is now!

Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi Archetti, Valerio Tricoli, etc. In 2019, Die Schachtel launched a new series, Decay Music, once again stitching a bond between the present and the past by making a nod to Michael Nyman’s seminal debut and its place within Brian Eno’s development and creation of early ambient music. Now Decay Music returns with its seventh and eighth instalments, the celebrated Italian composer Paolo Spaccamonti’s “Ifigenia/Oreste” - a stunning gesture of guitar based electroacoustic minimalism - and “I hate all the words”, a haunting effort of brooding ambiences and tense textures, by Luca Scarabelli and Michele Lombardelli’s Untitled Noise.

First emerging into Italy’s rich context of experimental music sometime during the 2000s, Paolo Spaccamonti is a Turin-based guitarist and composer who has worked expressively with sound across numerous creative disciplines, not only producing an expansive discography of solo and collaborative works, but also scoring television shows, theatrical works, film, and a number of other contexts. Known for his ability to bridge the worlds of instrumental, electronic, and experimental music, with an incredible aptitude for creating haunting, immersive sonic experiences that oscillate between tension and release, his exploration of silence, noise, and melodic tension has earned him recognition as one of the most unique voices in modern composition, bringing him into intimate collaboration with everyone from Jochen Arbeit of Einstürzende Neubauten, to composers like Stefano Pilia, Riccardo Sinigallia, Jim White, and numerous others.

“Ifigenia/Oreste” is the original score for the theatrical production of the same name, directed by Valerio Binasco and produced by Teatro Stabile di Torino. Haunting and subtle, Spaccamonti’s composition, flowing across the LP’s two sides, mirrors the play's minimalist and intense staging, immersing listeners in an evocative soundscape that blends ambient textures with guitar-driven melodies. Reflecting on his collaboration with Binasco, Spaccamonti states: "From the first meeting with Valerio, it was clear that we aimed to create a production stripped of any unnecessary stylistic embellishments. Ifigenia and Oreste had to be severe, devoid of visual distractions, simple yet extreme in its own way. I sought to follow the same path with the music. The foundation is always the guitar, but I wanted to avoid overloading it, either harmonically or sonically. Sometimes, I treated it like a fragmented background noise; other times, I ventured into more aggressive, melancholic, or even melodic terrains, but always in a very human way. The text demanded an atmosphere that lived in the alternation of silence and rarefaction, like in the films of Bresson and Lanthimos. Short scenes interrupted by moments of darkness. In a marked rhythm, a suspense constantly suggesting the advance toward death, announced from the very first scene. Hence, the emphasis I wanted to place on silence through the music, even within individual tracks. Long, granular tails, like the (few) lights on stage."

While the nature of recorded music transports far beyond the context and multidisciplinary experience for which these sounds were originally conceived, when designing the LP’s sleeve for Die Schachtel’s release of “Ifigenia/Oreste”, Bruno Stucchi of Dinamomilano went to great lengths to mirror it in a conceptually two devotional form, rendering the release a fusion of sound, visual, staging and cultural reference.

Sprawling in scope, “Ifigenia/Oreste” is divided into ten movements (five per side) that explore sprawling tonal and textural ambience in ways that will resonate deeply with fans of artists like Rafael Toral, Oren Ambarchi, and Christian Fennesz, unifying Spaccamonti’s signature sense of mood and tension, via brilliantly restrained guitar work. While each piece is defined by a clear distinction in temperaments, each is defined by an evolving sense of unity by a shared approach to abstraction and a deconstructed melodic sensibility, drawn from drifting long-tones, bubbling pulses, and granular textures that ease over each respective duration at an immersively glacial pace.

Shimmering with a surprising amount of lightness and playfulness throughout its shadowy depths, Paolo Spaccamonti’s “Ifigenia/Oreste” is a stunning statement of contemporary ambient, electroacoustic music, rendering endless surprises within its subtle and understated structures and tonal and textural approaches.

Untitled Noise Decay Music n.8: I Hate All the Words (LP)

Founded in 2014 by Luca Scarabelli and Michele Lombardelli, Untitled Noise have slowly carved their way across the last decade of Italian experimental practice, playing live widely in art galleries, museums, and concert halls, guided by an approach to improvisation, “conceived as a philosophy and compositional methodology that allows dialogue between the two artists.. [choosing] the unfinished, hypnotic, and repetition, as a means to suspend time and present hypothetical journeys into imagistic sonorous depths, permeated by anxieties of total submersion. Both artists are respected visual artists who have been active in the Italian contemporary art scene for many years, and approach their collaboration as Untitled Noise, as pushing their expressions beyond what is possible within their primary contexts. Following their sprawling 2017 self-titled debut issued by Die Schachtel, and “Perpetual Possibility”, their 2019 collaboration with Lino Capra Vaccina, that dropped via Dark Companion, “I Hate All the Words” is their third LP and first release in five years.

“I hate all the words” is a concept album, comprising three tracks that explore the remote and hidden depths of psyche: Misery, the awareness; The Time, the suspension of disbelief; and Heaven, the existential atonement through detachment. Comprising sounds primarily performed by Michele Lombardelli, set against the intermittent occurrence of haunting vocalisations by Erica Bazzeghini, whose lyrics were written by Luca Scarabelli, drawing inspiration from a personal experience as well as his art, the album’s totality emerges as a series of dark densities and soundscapes, gathering and intertwining noise-glitch sound patterns, distortions, and objects set into vibration, penetrated by deeply emotive poetics.

In Scarabelli’s words the album: ”is a path to test the truth, the mistery and the meaning of words.. self-reflection has been an intimate journey, often conducted in the seclusion, away from the chaos of external reality. In the lyrics it is mirrored in three distinct stages: self-awareness marked by Misery, the suspension of disbelief symbolized by the passage of Time, a moment of misgiving, and finally, recovery through detachment, in the track Heaven. In my thoughts, I see the works of poets like T.S. Eliot, Georg Trakl, and Sylvia Plath, who explored personal pain and transformation. ‘I hate all the words’ resonate the mysterious meaning of words as well as the poetry hidden in them.”

Falling somewhere between the radical electroacoustic explorations that emerged from European electronic music studios like GRM and EMS during the 1960s and 70s, and the industrial experimentalism of projects like Nurse with Wound, Coil, and Current 93, “I hate all the words” might be considered a tapestry woven from “fragments of thoughts and a sonic exploration change the perception of the present reality, evoking the ghosts of the past, in a shattered time, with the weight of whispered words”: the darkened char of its tense tontines and clattering and grinding textures played in swirling, emotively evocative harmony against Bazzeghini’s reverberant expressions of Scarabelli’s.

Truly stunning, Untitled Noise’s “I Hate All the Words” pulls the rug from beneath most standing perceptions of what ambient music can be, imbuing it with a primal darkness that rewrites beauty anew.