901 Editions presents “Diastima” by Luigi Turra, a work that explores the relationship between notation, sound, and perception through a reduced electroacoustic language, in which each element is brought to the threshold of its own possibility.
At the core of the project is a collection of essential, open, often enigmatic graphic scores by French composer Sylvain Chauveau. These are subtle marks that do not describe, but suggest; that do not determine, but orient. In them, notation moves away from a descriptive function to approach a more fragile and poetic dimension, in which the musical gesture is only evoked.
Turra’s interpretations are inscribed within this space of indeterminacy. Each score becomes a field of possibilities, a device that activates listening and response. The sound does not “realise” the score, but traverses it: it grasps its internal tensions, amplifies its margins, and inhabits its intervals.
With “Diastima”, Luigi Turra continues a path grounded in precision, subtraction, and elegance, defining a space in which music and listening coincide in their most essential and unstable form. The title itself — “Diastima” — evokes the idea of an interval: a distance, a suspension, a space of tension between two presences. It is within this intermediate space that the work takes shape, not as an accumulation, but as an articulation of voids, of waiting, and of minimal signs.
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Performed by Luigi Turra 2023-2024
Scores by Sylvain Chauveau
REVIEW
Measure, even before sound, is the rare quality concealed within this work. An inner measure, almost calligraphic, able to transform a minimal sign into an acoustic event, an electric scratch into thought, a pause into living matter. Luigi Turra’s new work, born from the graphic scores of Sylvain Chauveau and welcomed into the catalogue of 901 Editions, presents itself as a complete editorial object, curated by Fabio Perletta with that lucid tension which has long made the Abruzzo-based label one of the most attentive presences in the dialogue between experimental music, contemporary art, and the book form.
Diastima refers back to the Greek διάστημα. It means interval, separation, the space between two points, the duration that passes between two events. In music, it also indicates the relationship between pitches, that invisible measure through which two sounds enter into relation. Turra seems to begin precisely here, from a word that already contains a theory of listening. Every sonic occurrence is born as a figure placed in relation to another figure, every friction emerges from a field of waiting, every impulse finds meaning in the quantity of air that precedes and follows it. The title thus becomes both poetic key and working method. Diastima speaks of sound as a sensitive interval, as a held breath, as a fragile geometry between presence and disappearance.
Chauveau’s scores have the pace of signs that merely hint. Lines, clues, traces, subtle apparitions, graphic elements entrusted to an open reading. In them, musical writing loses any rigid prescriptive function and acquires an almost mediumistic force. The sign calls the gesture, the gesture calls listening, listening calls a response. Turra receives this call with the discipline of one who knows the value of the margin and the power of matter reduced to its essence. His electroacoustic language works through subtraction, with an extreme care for detail, until the specific weight of every sonic grain becomes perceptible. Here a click seems to possess the gravity of a distant percussion, a friction assumes the relief of a voice, a digital residue opens like a small cold constellation.
The most fascinating point of the album lies in its ability to transform reduction into movement. To a distracted ear, Diastima might appear severe, almost motionless. To a listening ear, it reveals an intensely mobile inner structure, made of micro-variations, refractions, ignitions, dissolves, and shifts of intensity. Turra builds a sonic organism that breathes at low temperature. Acoustic, concrete, and electronic sources brush against one another in a shared zone, where matter loses its name and acquires tactile quality. One listens with the ear, certainly, but also with the fingers, with the skin, with the physical memory of minute gestures. The sound seems gathered from nearby surfaces, from lightly solicited objects, from barely perceptible magnetic fields, from presences placed at the edge of acoustic visibility.
From this perspective, Diastima enters into dialogue with a precise tradition of research music, one that has made less into a form of intensity and the pause into a structural element. Turra, however, avoids any aesthetics of emptiness as pose. Emptiness here possesses density. It has grain, weight, friction, temperature. Every pause seems charged with what generated it and with what might follow. The beauty of the work arises precisely from this state of vigilance. The listener is led into a dilated time, where the minimal gesture acquires an almost theatrical force and where dynamics are measured through infinitesimal movements. Tension grows through an accumulation of perception, through a gradual education of the listening gaze.
The relationship with Sylvain Chauveau adds a further layer of meaning. Over time, Chauveau has built a musical universe founded on quietness, rarefaction, clear writing, ecological attention to the artistic gesture, music for acoustic instruments, electronics, and silences. His graphic scores, in Diastima, reach Turra as primary matter, both visual and mental. The relationship between the two authors produces a hybrid form, suspended between artist’s book, interpretative practice, and electroacoustic composition. For this reason, the editorial project of 901 Editions appears perfectly focused. The CD, the volume, the paper, the graphic design, the limited edition: every element participates in the same idea of attention. Fabio Perletta, as curator and visual designer, gives the whole a silent coherence, almost a moral quality of the object. Diastima asks to be listened to and observed, consulted and crossed slowly, as happens with those works in which support and content grow together.
Mirco Salvadori – lost in it
Nella relazione non può non esserci distanza. È la misura dell’alterità e del rispetto. È respiro di vita. Nel dialogo che l’artista veneto intrattiene con gli spartiti grafici di Sylvain Chauveau, sono queste le esperienze che facciamo. E che ci danno la misura di quanto siamo ancora umani. Per sintesi classificatoria siamo nei territori d’una elettroacustica riduzionista, non idiomatica, eppure ricca di temi, con varietà timbriche e strumentali di grande portanza emotiva (Score 31), il cui lessico poetico post-Treatise è già distillato nella memoria e si riattiva ogni volta che una musica o un/a musicista, alchemicamente, ritrova la ricombinazione, qui in molteplici varianti.
L’attenzione e la tensione sono continuamente sollecitate perché il suono (o la sua assenza) non interpreta il segno, ma casomai lo ambienta tenendosene a distanza; e lo fa intorno e dentro l’ascoltatore. Il prezioso libro che contiene il compact disc non è dunque un semplice supporto documentale, ma diventa la narrazione d’una storia d’amore, il libretto di un’opera che ognuno canterà per sé, una raccolta di preghiere prossima a quella silenziosa in cui non si chiede più nulla perché tutto già è oltre (Score 75).L’altr* di una coppia che è un Uno così come lo intende Emily Dickinson.
Dionisio Capuano – Blow Up
Diastima, released by 901 Editions, finds Luigi Turra working at the point where notation, sound and perception almost fall apart from delicacy. The project begins with a series of essential, open graphic scores by French composer Sylvain Chauveau: sheets of subtle marks that refuse to explain themselves. These drawings do not describe in any conventional sense; they suggest, orient and gently mislead. They abandon the security of notation as instruction and move into a more fragile, poetic register, where the musical gesture is only ever evoked, never pinned down. Turra’s response is to treat each score as a field of possibilities rather than a plan to be executed. Within this space of indeterminacy, sound does not “realize” the notation so much as traverse it, brushing against its edges and dwelling in its gaps. Using a reduced electroacoustic language — isolated tones, close mic’d textures, filtered noise, tiny percussive events — he brings every element to the threshold of its own possibility. A single sound might be stretched until it frays; a faint rustle might be amplified until it becomes a landscape. Internal tensions in the drawings are translated into dynamics of proximity and distance, presence and withdrawal. The scores become devices that activate listening and response, not blueprints to be followed. Across the album, Turra continues the trajectory that has marked his work for years: a commitment to precision, subtraction and a pared back elegance. Diastima defines a space in which music and listening effectively coincide; what you hear is as much the act of attention as it is any “composition” in the traditional sense. The title — Diastima as interval, distance, suspension — is central. These pieces inhabit the space between two presences: between mark and sound, intention and reception, event and memory. Rather than building through accumulation, the music proceeds by articulating voids, waits and minimal signs. It is in those intermediate spaces that the work takes shape, asking the listener to lean into the almost nothing where, unexpectedly, a great deal is happening.
Forced Exposure
