Francesco Venturi composer, vocalist, researcher

Diftantia

Premiered by Francesco Venturi and Musicians at DIY Space, London

Francesco Venturi: voice, bowed bass, music

Vassiłina: voice

Fraser Bowles, Sinanezelo Mancama, Derek Yau: cello

Mina Demirdag: moog

To be sung in Greek, Toki Pona and Sudanese dialect.

Diftantia is a drone-like act of live composed improvisation, inspired by the concept of depth. It features extreme extended techniques, modular synthesis, electric bass and four cellos, and it comes from the genre-crossing collaboration of very different musicians. Though as a concert piece, yet it contains a keen retinic aspect. Diftantia is all about depth, though as architectural depth (perspective), sonic depth (lowness), historical depth (anachrony) — and it constitutes a meditation about the relations between tridimensionality and bidimensionality within the digital era.

The title is the misspelled word Distantia (Latin for ‘distance’). During the era of movable type, the character ‘s’ was shaped like something close to an ‘f' (see fig. 1) and today’s optical-character-recognition software recognize that character as such. Every digital scan of Latin texts which is found on the internet contains, in fact, that typo (see fig. 2). Diftantia is about a distance with an error, about a digitalized past which is reaching us with glitches, about bodies which travel between two and three dimensions losing their integrity. It is about shapes which shift between different timelines, between multiple forms of depth, between retina and cochlea.

Diftantia is conceived as an organic, dark and telluric landscape — where the growl singing plays a pivotal role (see 15 Theses on Creak). Against the background of a dark matter, within which the relationships between bodies and sounds are modulated continuously, few moments of pure ‘light’ appear, as rays within the darkness.