Flowing – Elli Records

This collection of pieces was created with the intention of bringing together different mixes I have made in recent years in a totally anarchic way. Little by little I organised the sounds and gave them a certain order. It seems to me that the basic idea of this work can be condensed by the word symphony; to put sounds together, to bring them together; to pretend that the sounds are able to stay together. This then is a symphony, telling something very simple and at the same time heroic in a way: the love of sounds, of trying out combinations of timbres and forms. It is a single piece in five movements, which are not distinguished so much by different temporalities, but rather by hypotheses. The whole creates a kind of music that relies upon testimonies of musicians I had collected. The disc is dedicated to the little ones, Ettore and Lucio. Love, track 2, to Laura, Flowing Again to /nu/thing, they know why, Spirits to Lucia Peralta, the violist who is present in various parts of the disc and finally Escape to Franco Venturini, unstoppable pianist and composer. 

www.elli.media
Composed and produced by Eric Maestri
Mastering by Emanuele Battisti ©2025 Eli Records Catalog number EL59
Artwork Nelio, 2209202146, 2022
©ADAGP, Paris, 2025
Graphic design Thomas Rochon

1. Melting [11’41’’]

All the sounds are superimposed; they come out of inventions of erased words, the traces of whose sounds remain. One on top of the other, to make them merge into a flowing stream. A certain disorder, a global non-sense, finds its way out through viola notes. Suddenly a character emerges; but it is not what you think; it is bigger, it is a coloured cloud, which will come back to make people talk about it. 

2. Love [6’19’’] (dedicated to Laura) 

Spinoza wrote that love is joy and hate is sorrow: 

L’amore è letizia

L’odio è tristezza

La speranza è letizia incostante

L’odio è tristezza incostante (Spinoza, Ethica)

I share this perspective and immerse it in a nature gone mad, which, after all, lives very well without our love, hatred, gladness and sadness. The choir singing was the Choeur de chambre de Strasbourg who commissioned the piece and recorded it in 2008.

3. Flowing Again [16’05’’] (dedicated to /nu/thing)

A flow of sounds building on a given cantus. I borrowed some sounds from friends. It was something we wrote together and here I give the version as I would have liked it. I tried to put it all in; to create coherence out of incoherence; to metaphysically bend it all to one, coherent light. A kind of game of make-believe that makes different things seem one. I tried to create sonic emotions; to evoke the whole, the full, a kind of sublime all my own. 

4. Spirits [9’04’’] (dedicated to Lucia)

I put myself in a room with a violist and spirits appeared from a Requiem. These spirits appear to me in memory, in a kind of drowsiness scattered and reappearing in the woods. Burning with heat I search for a space from which other spirits from the contemporary Middle East emerge. These appear at the end of a square. They are the protests of a people who have no land. 

5. Escape [15’24’’] (dedicated to Franco)

Finally, I run away to the piano player’s house, who does not come off the same chord. Then I decompose it and take it elsewhere. This movement is closest to my current concerns. When I repeat something, how much can I repeat; and if I move a sound just a little, can it be heard? Can I steal time?