To paraphrase Charles Dickens, dusk is generally my time for walking. “The glare and hurry of broad noon are not adapted to idle pursuits like mine.” And then there is that “constant pacing to and fro”, the “never-ending restlessness”, the incessant tread of feet wearing rough stones smooth. ianua, too, asks to be encountered at dusk and at low volume. The hour may be borrowed on my part and well-trodden on Elia Piana‘s, but those stones worn smooth by incessant footsteps offer a fitting image for music concerned with repetition and the minute changes it leaves behind.
The guitar is the sole source of ianua, although you would be hard pressed to identify it for much of the record. Across ten short pieces, Piana turns it into pulses, knocks, grainy loops, brittle percussion and hovering electronic textures. Sounds recur without quite repeating themselves, sometimes gathering into rough rhythmic patterns before their edges blur and rhythm slips into timbre. Elsewhere, isolated sounds hang in space, answered by others that almost seem to belong to the same pattern. There is something tactile about the process, as though repetition were slowly wearing the material smooth.
This restricted vocabulary remains in place throughout. “15” introduces low pulses, scattered impacts and brighter tones; subsequent pieces rearrange similarly reduced materials, with changes sometimes minute enough that listening becomes an exercise in noticing what has happened to a loop since it last passed. Tape speed stretches and compresses events, while brief rhythmic figures can accumulate until their individual attacks dissolve into texture. There is patience involved, both in Piana’s handling of these materials and in what the record asks from its listener.
Space and silence carry much of the remaining weight. Piana rarely crowds the recordings, leaving sounds surrounded by resonance and faint residue. At the suggested low volume, details can sit close to the edge of audibility. The two “exit” pieces provide apparent interruptions, although neither offers much sense of departure, and by “eels” and the final “exit 3” it is difficult to say how far we have travelled from where we began.
Perhaps Dickens wasn’t such an arbitrary companion after all. His nocturnal walker finds greater possibilities in partial revelation than in the unforgiving clarity of daylight. ianua makes a similar wager. The familiar body of the guitar appears fleetingly before disappearing again into pulse, grain and resonance. Dusk, doors and cycles hover around the album, but underneath them is a remarkably simple proposition: a guitar, tape and a Plumbutter, with a small collection of sounds circling one another until the last exit leaves the door open for another beginning.
photo by Gabriela Dominguez
To walk us through dusk and into ianua, Elia Piana answered four questions by email.
ianua is made entirely from guitar sounds, although for much of the album the original instrument is almost impossible to recognise. What interested you about restricting yourself to a single source and then pushing it to the point where guitar can become pulse, percussion, noise or electronic texture?
The guitar was my first instrument, which I later set aside as I moved towards experimentation with synthesisers and the electronic world. In recent years, partly thanks to some of the music I have been listening to, and above all through my interaction with and admiration for Giuseppe Ielasi, I have returned to the instrument and begun exploring the timbral possibilities that could emerge from such a familiar source.
In this sense, the decision to use the guitar exclusively came not so much from a desire to impose a limitation on myself, but from a curiosity to see how far it was possible to go within a single body of sound. I was interested in progressively losing the reference to the instrument, transforming the guitar into something else—pulse, rhythm, noise, texture—without any need for its origin to remain recognisable. The restriction therefore became a way of opening up possibilities rather than closing them down.
Another important source of inspiration for this approach was my ongoing dialogue with my friend and fellow artist Vittorio Guindani. Our conversations have always been very constructive and creative, and they encouraged me to reduce, to subtract, and to express myself without needing to have a predetermined goal, allowing the process itself to suggest the direction before the result had even taken shape.
That is how ianua came into being, through a simple dialogue between guitar, tape and Plumbutter.
One thing I hear throughout the record is an unstable relationship between rhythm and timbre: an isolated sound can establish a pulse, repetition can turn that pulse into a rough texture, while greater density can make individual rhythmic events disappear into noise. How much of that behaviour comes from your work with the Plumbutter, and how much emerges through the tape process itself? In particular, what do changes of tape speed and irregular playback give you that a precisely controlled digital loop would not?
The Plumbutter is inherently an “unstable” instrument: rhythm is determined by shifting voltages and pulses that are not always regular, and this instability became one of the album’s defining characteristics. The guitar passed through the Plumbutter and then onto tape, where I imposed another restriction on myself: working with only a few seconds of material at a time. Starting from very short loops, I allowed their repetition—particularly when they were sped up or slowed down—to progressively transform rhythm into timbre, and then into a kind of sonic matter.
Tape added another level of unpredictability. I could physically intervene in the playback, altering the speed, disturbing the tape, or simply allowing small playback errors to modify the sound. Sometimes a recording would then be played back and re-recorded, as happened with the two “exit” tracks, which we’ll discuss later. Each stage therefore introduced small variations that were not entirely under my control.
Compared with the precision of a digital loop, this approach allowed me to create movement within repetition: the loop remains recognisable, but it never returns in exactly the same way. It is precisely this contrast between the cyclical nature of repetition and its micro-variations that has always fascinated me, ever since I first encountered Basinski’s work.
The title comes from the Latin for “door” and the symbolism of Janus, while you describe Ianua as a cyclical work in which the end folds back into the beginning. How literally did that idea determine the album’s construction and sequencing? I’m particularly curious about the two “exit” pieces: if the record is cyclical, what does it mean to have an “exit” from something that ultimately returns you to its beginning?
Yes, cyclicality was a key element during the compositional process, and obviously the very concept of the loop naturally leads towards this idea. I have always been fascinated by the symbolism of the Ouroboros, the end merging with the beginning, and likewise by Yin and Yang in Chinese culture and its three-dimensional conception, where, as black ends, white is already beginning, and within each one its opposite is already present. That is how nature works; that is how we are.
The two tracks “exit 1” and “exit 3” are the only ones that, as I mentioned above, were transferred onto cassette for a second time, thereby slightly changing the approach. And there is no “exit 2”: there is this duality, as though the two pieces represented a kind of way out of the cycle, but only an apparent way out. The very moment we try to interrupt the cycle, we inevitably end up generating another one. The exit therefore becomes a new entrance, and the attempt to escape cyclicality ultimately becomes an integral part of it. There is consequently no true ending, but rather a continual transformation in which every conclusion already contains the beginning of something that starts again.
You specify that these pieces were designed to be heard at low volume, at dusk, which is unusually precise listening guidance. What changes for you when Ianua is heard quietly? Is lowering the volume a way of making the listener attend more closely to the small variations, tape imperfections, resonances and spaces between sounds—and why is dusk the environment in which you imagine that listening taking place?
Yes, listening at low volume is something I enjoy. Obviously, it depends on the kind of music, but I feel that listening to certain music quietly has a different effect on me. It draws me more deeply into the act of listening, allowing me to be carried by the music, to stop, and to find a sense of peace.
Ianua is a selection drawn from a larger series of recorded compositions, and while I was working on them, I enjoyed listening back to them during my solitary journeys, in the car, particularly in the evening. Those moments gave me a particular feeling of peace: the cyclicality of the loops, the timbres, and the small variations that kept recurring without ever being exactly the same.
I consider dusk the most “poetic” moment of the day. It is when the day’s frenzy begins to slow down and we return to a more intimate, perhaps even more fragile dimension. The colours change and become warmer and, somehow, they lead me back inwards. I like the idea that the listener might experience the music in this way too—not necessarily trying to interpret it, but simply allowing it to accompany them through a moment of transition.
It is also the only precise instruction I wanted to give for listening to the album. I deliberately chose not to give the tracks titles because I didn’t want to suggest any particular image or meaning to the listener. In this case, however, specifying a time of day and a way of listening simply means creating a context, while still leaving everyone free to find their own meaning within the music.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
