Vittorio Guindani ~ la porta bianca

There is something fitting about Vittorio Guindani finding a home for these recordings in Vilhelm Hammershøi’s The White Door. Before becoming an album, La Porta Bianca existed in a kind of limbo: music without a place, waiting for the image that would finally give it a context. Originating from the same 2023 sessions as Materia Breve, these pieces ultimately found their symbolic shelter in Hammershøi’s painting, whose silent rooms and atmosphere of suspended time resonate deeply with Guindani’s own aesthetic.

In recent years Hammershøi has become something of a cultural touchstone, the epitome of understated cool: endlessly reproduced in design magazines and social media feeds, his empty rooms and half-open doors offering a vision of stillness that feels increasingly fabricated. Yet La Porta Bianca reaches beyond mere aesthetic affinity. Guindani adopts the painting not simply as an image but as a conceptual space, a luminous threshold through which these abandoned recordings can finally enter and find their place.

The connection with Materia Breve is deeper than chronology. That album was accompanied by Luca Lanfredi’s poem Il richiamo del nome, whose recurring images of thresholds, absences and elusive presences seem to resonate strongly with Guindani’s artistic vision. Lines such as “Every universe has its own language” and “Every universe is a music score” feel particularly relevant here. Guindani has often spoken of sound not as narrative but as presence, of his desire to remain on the threshold before form solidifies into meaning. La Porta Bianca inhabits precisely that liminal territory, where sounds are allowed to simply exist rather than signify.

If Strame was, in Guindani’s own words, “a collection of ashes,” shaped by fear, loss and the collapse of certainties, La Porta Bianca occupies a more contemplative register. These are still fragments and residues, field recordings reduced to their barest essence, loops that hint at melodies without fully resolving, small sonic events enlarged until their grain becomes visible. Track 05 (none of the tracks have titles) is particularly revealing, subtly recalling the ambient dub sensibility explored in more recent releases such as Wabi. Here, however, echoes and resonances are stripped of any stylistic excess and reduced to pure spatial relationships.

Like Hammershøi’s painting, the album is not concerned with what lies beyond the door, it doesn’t try to second guess. Sometimes it’s enough just to be there, to be present in the moment, to stand before the door. The result is one of Guindani’s most understated and affecting releases: a work of quiet attention where silence becomes a form of presence, and every small sound seems illuminated by a soft light from an adjoining room.

It is fitting that the album’s graphic restyling by Vittorio Guindani places a “white door” over Marina Marcolin’s artwork for Materia Breve. We choose to view any reference to Jonathan Barnbrook’s design for David Bowie’s 2013 album The Next Day, which superimposes a large white square over Masayoshi Sukita’s photograph from Heroes, as intentional.

To expand on the production process for La porta bianca we’ve reached out to Vittorio Guindani.

La Porta Bianca gathers pieces left aside from the Materia Breve sessions and places them under the sign of Vilhelm Hammershøi’s The White Door. What changed when you revisited these recordings? Did the painting help you understand what kind of place these sounds belonged to?

As is often the case for me, I only find the meaning of things once they have already been made.

The material left aside from Materia Breve has been the subject of repeated listening on my part from 2023 until today, and I often found myself wondering what to do with it. I considered—and still consider—these pieces worthy works, so I wanted to give them a home and a name.

In situations like this, I need a spark of inspiration. Whether it comes from a poem (Strame, for example, is a word drawn from the writings of Montale), a text (as was the case with Jisei in 2020), or a philosopher matters little. The discovery of Hammershøi filled that gap.

In his paintings, I found again the quiet, silent atmosphere that surrounded me during the making of Materia Breve, the sense of emptiness I needed.

The White Door is both the perfect painting and the perfect title: a luminous, uncluttered opening that seems to say to these orphaned pieces, “Come in, you are home.”

Looking at Materia Breve (2023), Strame (2025), and La Porta Bianca (2026), one senses a continuous investigation into fragments, remains, traces, and impermanence. Do you see these works as part of a larger cycle, and what has this long exploration taught you about listening and loss?

Absolutely. I believe my entire sonic exploration has been a development of these themes.

Listening has taught me how to bear witness. This became especially clear through the practice of field recording: finding myself in front of something immense that I cannot control and of which I can only be a witness.

In this sense, I have found affinities with various aspects of Zen Buddhism, such as non-attachment and, consequently, the ability to let go—things that are far easier to understand than to put into practice.

The loss of my parents between 2020 and 2024 has undoubtedly influenced the way I perceive things.

You have described Strame as “a collection of ashes” shaped by feelings of fear, impotence, and the desire to react through the ruins. La Porta Bianca, by contrast, feels quieter and more reconciled. Has your relationship with absence and fragility changed in recent years?

La Porta Bianca and Materia Breve both date from 2023, during the post-Covid resurgence, positioned midway between Jisei (2020), which was deeply infused with Zen influences, and Strame (2025), my most dramatic work.

Humanity seems closer than ever to catastrophe; we are hanging by a thread, fragile and defenceless. The collapse of civilisation and the violent arrogance of our times—so evident for all to see—have led me toward a profound disillusionment, pushing me to search for meaning amid this absurd climate.

You often describe yourself as being interested in creating a presence rather than music. Could you elaborate on that distinction? What qualities make a sound become a presence?

Sound and Presence are undoubtedly connected.

Sound is the material of inquiry from which I begin—full of possibilities—allowing me to shape a Presence before it becomes a completed Form.

What interests me is remaining on the threshold that precedes the narrative implied by Form: creating something that simply is, without any apparent meaning, something that does not demand attention.

Paradoxically, I love to think that what I do is of no importance.

Both Materia Breve and La Porta Bianca use numbered titles rather than descriptive ones. Is this a way of resisting narrative interpretation and encouraging a more direct encounter with sound? I’m also reminded of Luca Lanfredi’s poem accompanying Materia Breve, particularly the lines “Every universe has its own language” and “Every universe is a music score.” Do these ideas resonate with the way you think about your pieces?

Words close things off; they define boundaries and impose limits. For this reason, I prefer not to give titles unless it is strictly necessary.

I think this is also why I love poetry and its peculiar use of language, as can be seen in Luca’s beautiful text. I deliberately never asked myself what it might mean (it was written after listening to the pieces), yet I find the passages you highlighted deeply resonant, especially when connected to the idea of the soundscape—a foundational concept that has always animated my work.

Your work often sits between field recording, sound art, reductionism, and composition. Looking back from Jisei through Strame, Materia Breve, Altri Steli, and La Porta Bianca, do you feel your practice is becoming more minimal, or are you simply learning to listen more attentively to what was already present around you?

At the beginning, my approach was more landscape-oriented, whereas now I often focus on smaller, more “interior” sounds, isolating their content like individual grainy frames.

I have listened a great deal and gathered a vast amount of material, and now I simply manipulate and organise it according to a certain element of chance—or rather, according to an instinct that has been refined over time.

Removing, reducing, and stripping things away allows me to explore sound in its infinite possibilities.

At the moment, I am recording very few new sound sources. I no longer find much interest in the sounds around me that I have not already documented in one form or another.
(Gianmarco Del Re)