Italian Wire Suites
Field recordings from Trentino, Tufo, and Topolò

Track listing
1. Trentino (18:51)
2. Tufo (18:08)
3. Topolò (13:30)

This album is a suite of three soundscape compositions created during a month-long stay in Italy in the summer of 2012.

At the time, I stayed in three different regions of Italy: Trentino in the north; Tufo in the south; and Topolò, on the border between Italy and Slovenia. In each place, I recorded the local environments and had the chance to share these sounds with audiences through performances. It was a period when I was exploring how to make music without traditional instruments but through experimental field recording with handmade electronics. I entered into it with the hope that this would become a meaningful time to deepen my sound practice - listening and sounding in the field.

What made that summer particularly special was the encounter with “wires” — a motif that has since become a significant sonic image in my work. In all three places, I spent hours listening to the natural resonance of wires. Sometimes I leaned close in the vineyard during the day; sometimes I simply waited beneath the overwhelming rain at night in the mountains. I also brought in handmade pulse generators and feedback systems, letting their signals interfere with the wires and the weather, becoming another mode of sounding in the field. Those durational acts of listening and sounding became engraved in my memory as a lasting image of musical time-being.


 This memory later became a catalyst for me to begin thinking of instruments not just as tools, but as fields where sound could be re-discovered and re-approached. Over the past few years, I find my growing interest in treating the piano as a string instrument somehow ‘wired’ to this motif; experimental techniques such as bowing the piano strings with different threads, electronic devices and even voice to create friction, resonance and interference.

That said, these pieces are not just about wires. The sounds of wind, rain, train, birds, streams, bells, sheep, windows and pulses are all present too.

I’m happy to finally share these tracks as a complete album—after quite some time.


It feels as if that long, resonating wire from back then is still reaching toward me today, and I sometimes find myself wanting to pluck it gently with my fingers.

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Thanks to

Davide Ondertoller and Sara Maino for hosting me at the Portobeseno Festival in Trentino and for their ongoing contribution to soundscape culture, which I deeply respect.

Leandro Pisano and the FARM residency team for arranging trips and inviting me to the residency in Tufo.

Signe Lidén, for her thoughtful companionship and conversations while accompanying me to Topolò, and Moreno Miorelli of Stazione di Topolò/Postaja Topolove, for telling stories of the mountain wire and generously allowing me to make recordings in their landscape. license

Boomkat

Gonzoid documents of metal wires reacting with the elements and handmade electronics in Italy, made by Korean artist Jiyeon Kim, whose presence is imperceptible but crucial to the soundscapes.

Matthew Blackwell, Bandcamp Daily

In 2012, Jiyeon Kim traveled across Italy, recording the landscape: sheep, birds, trains, wind, and rain. But what captured her imagination was not the land itself, but the wires stretched across it. She spent hours listening to the natural resonance of trellis wire around vineyards and a metal pulley wire, which was used to transport logs to the village. Across Italian Wire Suites, the wires boom, shake, and moan, and even sound like sci-fi lasers (as on “Topoló”). Since this experience, Kim began thinking of her primary instrument, the piano, as a string instrument that can be manipulated similarly. But the inspiration began here, in the Italian countryside: “It feels as if that long, resonating wire from back then is still reaching toward me today,” Kim says, “and I sometimes find myself wanting to pluck it gently with my fingers.”
-The Best Field Recordings on Bandcamp, October 2025

Radio

Gaëtan Gosselin, La Croche Oreille

La Croche Oreille vous propose des projets de création qui dialoguent à partir d’une certaine idée de la nostalgie ou de la mélancolie, voire de quelque chose qui serait aux oubliettes depuis un temps mais qu’on imagine surgir à la simple écoute… Au programme, des travaux récentes de l’américain William Basinski, de la sud coréenne Jiyeon Kim et du québécois Pierre-Yves Martel.

Patrick Mcginley, framework radio