Paolo Angeli, the musical cartographer of the Mediterranean sea, on #Neuguitars #blog #PaoloAngeli
Paolo Angeli Official Site | RADE (2022)
If I look at the latest works by Paolo Angeli I begin to glimpse a path, a common thread that unites them in the name of the Mediterranean sea. Listening back to albums like Sale Quanto Basta (2013), S’Û (2015), Talea (2017), Jar’a (2021) and the very recent Rade (2022) means following a geographical path on a map reinvented every day, a incessant and continuous work of musical cartography aimed at the creation of a new Mediterranean atlas. The geography that occupies this atlas includes the beings who inhabit it and the forms of their passage through spaces, including the spaces of life and, above all, of music. This sound geography is a field of vessels, of boats, but also receptacles, of blood vessels, it is a place that encloses and moves. Giuliana Bruno wrote in her “Atlas of Emotions”, how the concept of vessel incorporates a double image: that of the boat and that of the artery, implying the container of a flow and a circulation system and how a similar geography of inhabitants and vectors / containers can be mapped.
Such musical cartography can have fantastic repercussions: graphically it can appear on a map in the form of a sequence of emotions. Paolo Angeli’s music, as an emotional map, is transformed into a mobile geographical container, a receptacle for fantasies in motion, a vehicle for emotions and even memories. A sound and musical plan capable of overcoming the idea of the map as a unifying and all-encompassing concept, produced by a distant and clinical gaze. Maps such as those of Paolo Angeli are often the subject of conflict for those who still think they live in a certified reality, for those who believe in hegemonic and authoritarian tools. For those who do not see the need, at least in the artistic field, to deconstruct and decolonize. Paolo Angeli’s music passes through the shadows of the nuanced representational margins of cartography, and the variety of cartographic charts and the variegated potentialities expressed by his impossible guitar represent transformative mapping tactics that resist a univocal and all-encompassing vision. “Rade” is a deconstructive and reassembling tactic, a vision of genre, a sound geography that presents numerous incarnations in maps that draw affections, places, incarnations that live on the border between art, politics and society.
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