Fragments by Roger Ballen, Massimo Pupillo, Gabriele Tinti

The album Fragments places Gabriele Tinti's poems and Roger Ballen's images in the context of Massimo Pupillo's sound world, where the inevitability of suffering is expressed through Ballen's uniquely dark recitation.

The music, words and images are intended to recreate a “primordial cave”. In Tinti's poetic vision, “Primordial Man was the consumer of the divine. In him, in his art, there was a constant exchange of energy with the sacred. Caves were probably necropolises : the dead were taken there and fed with the flesh and blood of an animal divinity that was sacrificed as bearer of unifying strength. Animam pro anima. Cor pro corde. As an intensified, repeated, primary act, it became a rite and consequently a cult. The entire figurative pantheon of Paleolithic man seems intended as a fulfilment of that rite. Man replicated the horror of killing with his signs and his pictures on the cave walls, freeing himself from the terror. Art then really did come to grips with the world, a laceration bearing the memory of the violence done to existing creatures. It was desire, prayer, wound, sore, sign produced on the simulacra of the bodies of animals and, at times, of men. What have we done, what will we do in the years to come if not to try to repeat, to relive this act of our beginning?.”

The text by Gabriele Tinti was first published in 2020 in the book The Earth Will come To Laugh and To Feast (Powerhouse Books, New York) a collection of poems with illustrations by the artist Roger Ballen.

As a coda to this obsessive tale, Massimo Pupillo explores the possibility of a soundtrack to Roger Ballen’s 1972 film Ill Wind, where the film's protagonist might find meaning, albeit a sisyphean one, and perhaps also consolation, in his struggles.

Music label for contemporary composition, experimental, improvisation, sound art. Unsounds was founded in 2001 by guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), composer/sound artist Yannis Kyriakides, and designer/visual artist Isabelle Vigier.

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