#1:”In Ersilia, to enstabilish the city-life-ruling relationships, inhabitants tie one house to another with tiny chords. Those chords are white, black, gray or black-and-white, depending on the type of relationship between the two houses. When the chords are so many that the streets become unwalkable, inhabitants leave the city: houses are demolished, leaving only the chords with their sustains. […] They rebuild Ersilia somewhere else. […] So, walking in Ersilia’s territory you meet ruins of abandoned cities […] webs of intricate relationships searching for a form.”
#2:”So many people in the streets, fast reaching the market, women had nice teeths and looked at you straight in the eyes, three soldiers upon a stage played clarino, and everywhere wheels where turning […] That morning in Dorotea, I felt that everything one could desire was there.”
#3:”The thing making Argia a different city, is the presence of earth in place of air. Streets are completely underground, rooms are full of clay […] We can’t know if its inhabitants are able to walk around the city excavating like worms: dampness ruins the body, leaving not much forces; it’s so dark they like to lay down motionless […] From above, nothing of Argia can be seen; someone says <<it’s under there>> and we could just have faith.”
#4:”If Armilla is just incomplete or it’s been demolished, if that’s an enchantment or just a whim, I don’t know. Fact is, that it has no walls, nor ceilings, nor floors: it has nothing that makes it a city, beside the water plumbings, climbing up high.”
#5:”People in Bersabea, believes in this tale: suspended in the sky, another Bersabea exists , where all the most precious virtues and feelings of the city hover, and that, if the earthly Bersabea takes the heavenly one as a model, the two cities would fuse together.”
#6:”It was my first time in Trude, but I already knew my hotel”
#7:”Departing from there and walking towards the east for three days, one should find himself in Diomira, city with sixty silver domes, bronze statues of every god, streets paved in tin, a crystal theater, a golden cock singing from the top of a tower every morning. The wanderer knows all those marvels for having seen them in other cities.”
#8:”It’s your mood that decides Zemrude’s shape. If you pass through the city whistling, with your nose following the whistle, you will see window ledges, waving curtains, water spurts. Instead, if you walk with the chin in your chest […] your view will be entangled in manholes, fishbones, waste paper.”
#9:”Those who watch from the nearby hills, think of what could be happening in the city […] None of them desires to get into the town […] but Irene attracts the sight and the thoughts of the passer-bys […] Irene is a distant-city name, and getting closer would surely change it.”
#10:”The city of Zirma gives wanderers distinct memories: a blind nigger screaming from the crowd, a madman stretching out from the ledges of a skyscraper, a lady walking around with a tamed puma. Actually, many blind men in Zirma are niggers, in every skyscraper there’s a madman […] there’s no puma tamed by a lady’s caprice. […] Memory is redundant: it repeats the signs so that the city could start to exist.”
There’s no frontier.
[Quotes from the book “Le Città Invisibili” (“The Invisible Cities”) by Italo Calvino, 1972. Translation from Italian by me.]
-Marco Guerra Avitabile
VITALS:
Release: 2003
Label: Radar Swarm
Avantgenre: Audio Diaries Of A Metaphysical Journey
Duration: 38:20
Origin: France
Official site: http://www.tantrum.ws/
Review online since: 22.07.2010 / 01:23:45
TRACKLIST:
01 – In And Out Of The Moment
02 – Puss Oozing
03 – Soil
04 – Pale
05 – Dead End
06 – Suppose Control Can Increase
07 – Dig
08 – Lose One’s Sight
09 – Karb
10 – Other Suggestions And So On
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