“TSVI & Seven Orbits debut their Paraadiso* project with a whorl of sweeping choral arrangements and staggering rhythms for Shanghai’s SVBKVLT powerhouse. Inspired by Italian folk music, noise, ancient compositions and rituals, the result is a sort of widescreen 4D soundworld, something like Enigma/FSOL’s Lifeforms bolstered by smashed/syncopated hard drums and emo arpeggios rendered in slow motion.
“Unison is the duo’s conception of ritual music for contemporary, collective physical experience, aka the rave. With a masterful grasp of technoid dramaturgy, its 10 tracks draw on ancient choral traditions as much as up-to-the-second rhythmic diffusion styles to suggest new ways of moving and being moved, with a pointed focus on synchronising social action and reaction.
“Following their 2020 debut, Seven Orbits approaches the project from an audio-visual background, bringing a highly animated structure to TSVI’s rugged rhythmic proprioceptions. Unison was created by the pair to be performed in live context with visual accompaniment, and clearly conveys a strong sense of movement through the audio alone, coming close to the kind of balletic dynamics of Jlin and Second Woman.
“For the strongest examples we advise checking the lush choral lather and polymetric slosh of ‘Liquid Matter’ finding the duo at their most uplifting, the knuckled scuzz of ‘Berserk’ for their rudest workout, or the killer arrangement of haunting ancient chorales and bombed out dembow swag in ‘Riflesso,’ coming off like Laszlo Hortobagyi meets Paul Marmota at their darkest and most theatric.” —Boomkat, see also their artist statement on bandcamp
The final track is titled “Paradiso terrestre.”
* The spelling of the group’s name as ‘Paraadiso’ is intentional
Dan Simmon’s horror/science fiction short story, “Vanni Fucci is Alive and Well and Living in Hell” was first published in Night Visions 5, along with stories by Stephen King and George R. R. Martin.
“Sophie Giacomelli (1779-1819) is the earliest known female illustrator of Dante. Her engravings were published in 1813 – some years after John Flaxman’s ground-breaking, privately printed, neo-classical outline illustrations in 1793. Giacomelli has patently imitated the style but her Divine Comedie has undoubtable unique approaches, as this engraving of The Simonists (Canto XIX, Inferno) demonstrate. The popes are plunged head down into infernal holes so that only their flaming feet are seen. But it’s how this illustrator has captured Dante’s occasional ‘scaredy-cat’ episodes by having him caught in the arms of his strong and protective guide, Virgil. Giacomelli was also known as Billet (father’s name), Janinet (her stepfather’s name) and Madame Chomel. I’ve not been able to find information on this last name – which may have been a stage-name (she sang as well, after meeting up with her musician husband, Joseph Giacomelli). She was, by the briefest accounts available, a most impressive woman and it was many decades before another female had her Dante designs published. She is very rarely mentioned in Dante illustration.” –Emma Marigliano
