Carlo Giustini - Eden (2018)

"Eden might be an ideal place, a distant chimera placed on the summit of the Mountain of Purgatory (located at the antipodes of the once known world) and represents the last stage of the purification path that the souls must pursuit to access the paradise. At least so said Dante in his Divine Comedy.

Or is Eden just a place next door?

On May 9th 2018 I was awakened by a never heard sound.
It was the bewildered song of a hoopoe. It was there, under my window, plunging it’s beak into the earth in search for something.
The hoopoe is an ancient and rare totem, symbolizing the close connection between the two worlds, the visible and the invisible.
His song lasted for three days and for three days there he stayed, howling an onomatopoeic sound able to evoke the most remote inner states.

When he flew away, I was able to complete these recordings.

All sounds were caught with some dictaphones and clip on mics hanging from the windows of my house or placed in the sleeping streets of Santa Maria del Sile (TV) during the first days of spring awakening.

With this research I tried to paint my usual places with different colors, trying to get lost and reconnect with a different world, an exotic but terribly close place to which I wanted to give the name of Eden.

All field recordings were made with a dictaphone and two contact microphones, to which I mixed pieces of guitar loops played at different speeds through a C1 library of congress.

The bonus track is a real-time recording of my house. I placed a mic in the cellar, one on the roof, one in the bedroom and one outside the window. I think the result is a message from my home itself, a testimony of his continuous rattles and movements.

On track number two you can spot the ancient howling of the hoopoe."