Building upon their recent, incredible immersions into the contemporary landscape of experimental sound, Die Schachtel returns with one of their most striking releases to date, ‘Border Soundscapes II’, distilling their longstanding efforts at the borders of interdisciplinary practice with a profound sense of accomplishment and grace. Instigated and curated by the label’s own Bruno Stucchi - who also contributed the release’s graphic design - this very special vinyl only art edition encounters the guitarist and composer, Paolo Spaccamonti, operating in spectral collaboration with the renowned photographs of Pino Musi: utilizing 24 images selected by the artist - published as a three and a half meter long 'leporello' (accordion style) book that accompanies the edition - as the score for the detail and ambience laden abstractions that sprawl across the album’s two sides. Immersive and compelling through its many elements, as well as what is achieved through the whole, this one has completely blown us away.

Over the course of more than two decades of activity, the Milan based imprint, Die Schachtel, has helped coax and guide the landscape of experimental music toward the remarkable, rich context that we encounter today, intertwining historically significant efforts of artists and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, Demetrio Stratos, and numerous others, alongside contemporary works by Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi Archetti, Valerio Tricoli, Stefano Pilia, and Alessandra Novaga, to name only a few. In recent years, through their Decay Music and Ziet Music series, the label has blurred boundaries connected to creative location and the nature of musical practice. Their latest, ‘Border Soundscapes II’, a collaboration between the Paris-based Italian photographer and visual artist, Pino Musi, and the Turin-based guitarist and composer, Paolo Spaccamonti - inspired and instigated by Die Schachtel’s own Bruno Stucchi - draws upon foundations established by both of those series: Spaccamonti’s ambiance laden abstractions that have previously graced the Decay Music series, while Musi’s photographs mirror many of visual fundamentals of the Ziet Music catalog.

‘Border Soundscapes II’ represents a rare crystallization of the possibilities activated by a synthesis of interdisciplinary collaboration: a sublime conversation between sound, image, and design. Belonging to Die Schachtel’s ambitious conceptual mission, following an encounter with the work of Pino Musi, Bruno Stucchi recognized abstract properties of his images as holding the potential to operate as a graphic score. Working alongside the photographer, the pair selected 24 images and enlisted Paolo Spaccamonti as the perfect interpreter for the project, and uniquely capable of providing its sonic component.

Born in Salerno, but currently based in Paris, Pino Musi’s photographs - exhibited widely across the globe and featured in the Venice Biennale - utilize modern architecture, classical ruins, steel mills, rural architecture, and urban cityscapes as their subjects, focused on pure form and compositional abstraction, resulting in a profoundly beautiful and often uncanny vision of the contemporary world. As Bruno Stucchi beautifully describes it: “Pino’s photographs continually fade from image into sound and back again, from form into body. They inhabit an incredibly intense “inside” - almost an interior design - and at the same time open outward toward a vertiginous “outside,” a cosmos that overflows beyond the edges of the frame”. Paolo Spaccamonti is a Turin-based guitarist and composer who, for more than two decades, has worked with sound across numerous creative disciplines, not only producing an expansive discography of solo and collaborative works - including his recent contribution to Die Schachtel’s Decay Music series, ‘Ifigenia / Oreste’ - but also creating music for 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.

Stucchi states that: “the choice of Paolo Spaccamonti was natural and necessary. His sensitivity to a deeply material sound, capable of oscillating between extreme rarefaction and rough density, resonates intimately with Musi’s visual universe. In his work, sonic grain is always tactile, almost bodily, and the reading of sonic space unfolds in planes that chase, overlap, and interpenetrate”. From the first sounding of ‘Border Soundscapes II’, it’s hard not to recognize how right he was. Imbued with a deep sense of abstraction and space that mirrors the foundational elements of Musi’s photographs, Spaccamonti’s work on guitar - often unrecognizable as such - unfurls across the album’s two sides with a striking degree of range, embracing a palette of industrially tinged clangs and scrapes, subsumed tones, passages of dense distortion, overlapping and shifting drones, endlessly surprising tonal and timbral punctuations, and deconstructed melodies, the evolutions of which are collectively embedded, through an adept use of spatializations and scale, within the sprawling ambiences that bind these actions and their structural arrangements within a single, cohesive world.

As the sounds of ‘Border Soundscapes II’ unfold and develop, the conversation between Spaccamonti and Musi becomes increasingly dynamic and clear. Through the guitarist’s attentiveness to detail and range, his actions mirror and highlight the subtle elements and haunting qualities of the photographs, while doubling as a soundtrack: projecting themselves into, and inhabiting, the images and spaces they respond to. Perhaps most strikingly, Stucchi’s work as a curator and instigator of this project activates a unique, third dimension of collaboration that extends beyond that between the guitarist and photographer, and his own with the pair, engaging the listener / viewer and propelling us to inquire after the relationship between sound, image, and form with an attentiveness that is incredibly rare.

A truly incredible accomplishment that distills what Die Schachtel has pursued, through its many interdisciplinary experiments with the recording medium, over the years, ‘Border Soundscapes II’ is a stunning thing to behold and (literally and figuratively) witness unfold.