Say When

Gianni Mimmo & Ove Volquartz:

CD Digipack
Dec 2024

L’art n’a rien à voir avec les idées. (…) Les idées et l’algèbre des idées, c’est peut-être une voie de connaissance, mais l’art est un autre moyen de connaissance dont les voies sont tout autres : c’est celles de la “voyance”. C’est quand la “voyance” s’éteint qu’apparaissent les idées et le poisson aveugle de leurs eaux : l’intellectuel.” (Jean Dubuffet)

Of course, nothing could be further from the Art Brut than the Apollonian sonic warp of Gianni Mimmo and Ove Volquartz. Here, our focus is on the routes taken by blind fish between sounds and vibrations, their attempts to understand, classify, legitimize themselves.
The sound of ‘Say When’ requires no exegesis, frills, or suggestions. Not even interpretations or images to associate with, emotional crutches. No synesthesia. It is an immanent, absolute, literally objective expression. It requires nothing else. In its existence and presence, it is sufficient unto itself.

By disdaining interpretations and dialogues, Gianni and Ove’s music objectifies sound, breath, timbres, and dynamics, living from the moment in which it is blown. It appears to be a dialogue only because it interweaves voices, like desire, ceaselessly, creating and dissolving forms, clusters of sound, fractals, and embroideries, but it does not presuppose, nor does it require subjects, perspectives, recapitulations.
Cycles of sound, textures, matter that seems to compose itself only to dissolve, a flame that does not consume. It creates emptiness and absence—a clinamen, a deviation that sparks motion and sustains unquenchable tension.
If clairvoyance is forever lost, all that remains, like blind fish, is to abandon classificatory hubris, the anxiety of fresco, to listen to the water (‘How’s the water?’, David Foster Wallace) and take joy in its ripples.”

Andrea Dani

Tracklist

01. Stay reluctant 07:37
02. Athena amidst the olive trees 08:36
03. Say when 09:05
04. To put it mildly 07:37
05. More than one threshold 06:30
06. Distant peaks 10:16

Credits

All music by Gianni Mimmo and Ove Volquartz

Recorded at Interplay Studio, Milano, Italy on May 9, 2024
Sound engineering, mixing, editing, and mastering by Lorenzo Sempio

Cover artwork by Andrea Montanari
“Collage” from the series “Abstract In Your Home” (2022)
Layout by Davide Lorenzon

Produced by Mimmo, Volquartz
Published by Aut Records