Alessandro Ciccarelli / Milena Punzi Anfossi ~ Improvisations for the Land

Improvisations for the Land proceeds with unusual patience. Alessandro Ciccarelli and Milena Punzi Anfossi never seem in a hurry to introduce new material. Instead, they linger over individual sounds, allowing them to exhaust their possibilities before searching for another direction. At several points the music appears to reach an impasse, only for one of the musicians to uncover an entirely new path from within the same sonic terrain. The three improvisations share this quality of persistence, probing ever deeper where it might seem there is nothing left to uncover. The relationship between analogue synthesizer and electric cello is one of constant adjustment. Neither instrument occupies a permanent foreground. Sometimes the synthesizer holds a low-frequency plateau almost stubbornly while the cello slowly alters its pressure, grain and register around it. Elsewhere the electronics recede almost completely, leaving bowed textures to define the pace before quietly reclaiming the space through sustained drones and subtle shifts in colour. The music rarely advances through contrast. It moves by patiently examining the consequences of each gesture. Trial-and-error and risk-taking shape the entire album. High frequencies are sometimes sustained long enough to become physically demanding, forcing the listener to remain inside their unsettling presence instead of treating them as fleeting accents. Low drones establish a bodily weight that occasionally feels architectural rather than harmonic. Even when the texture thickens, each sound retains its own presence, allowing the ear to follow the gradual redistribution of energy across the spectrum. Listening repeatedly, one becomes increasingly aware of how carefully the musicians resist resolution. Electronic textures are allowed to stall. Bowed sounds lose energy without being replaced. Instead of smoothing over moments of uncertainty, Ciccarelli and Punzi Anfossi remain with them, allowing hesitation and suspension to become productive musical states. There is a quiet confidence in this willingness to stay with a sound after it has apparently reached its destination. The titles inevitably invite historical associations. Named after Palestinian villages destroyed during the Nakba, the three improvisations carry an emotional and political charge that extends beyond the music itself. Yet, as the musicians explain in the accompanying interview, the names were chosen only after the recordings had been completed. They do not function as narratives but acknowledge a state of mind that accompanied the project. The music retains its autonomy while remaining inseparable from the experiences that shaped its creation. The cover artwork quietly reinforces this idea. Its layered aerial image shows a fractured landscape at different degrees of resolution and density. Surfaces overlap, traces emerge only to disappear beneath new textures, and the eye is left to make sense of the jagged terrain. It mirrors the music’s own behaviour: sounds accumulate through successive layers, preserving earlier gestures without ever allowing them to become fixed. There is no attempt to overwhelm the listener through density or technical display. The album asks for a different kind of attention, one willing to remain inside slowly evolving textures and to follow sounds beyond their apparent destination. The longer one spends with these improvisations, the more they reveal through the patient excavation of what was already there. That patient search gives Improvisations for the Land its own voice. To explore things further, we have reached out to Alessandro Ciccarelli and Milena Punzi Anfossi. Improvisations for the Land is rooted in free improvisation, yet the album is also explicitly dedicated to Palestine, with each piece named after a village destroyed during the Nakba in 1948. Rather than illustrating specific events, the music seems to inhabit a space of tension, absence, and attentive listening. How did the decision to name the pieces after Isdud, Jusayr, and Hulayqat shape the improvisations themselves? Were you thinking about these places while performing, or did their historical weight become part of the music retrospectively? We believe that instrumental music — and, more specifically, the kind of improvisational practice we pursue — belongs to a process of abstraction in which music both can and should represent nothing but itself, rather than describing or illustrating events, images, or narratives. This autonomy, however, does not justify the notion of an art detached from life. On the contrary, life itself, the events that surround us, and the history we live through inevitably permeate our being, our sensibilities, and our actions as individuals and as musicians. For this reason, although sound does not represent anything, it is never a neutral or sterile space. As John Cage famously said, “Everything we do is music.” The world therefore does not remain outside music; it inevitably enters it through those who create it and those who listen. In his writings on music, Edward Said consistently defended the formal rigor of classical music without ever separating it from his condition as a Palestinian intellectual living in exile. For him, these two dimensions were never in conflict; they coexisted within the same gesture. The autonomy of form does not entail amnesia on the part of those who practice it. With this in mind, the titles of these pieces are neither captions nor interpretative keys, nor do they ask the listener to search within the music for references to a place or event. In her essay “Against Interpretation,” Susan Sontag argued that interpretation can become a way of taming a work of art — reducing it to its content and then interpreting that, making it manageable. At a time when criticism tended to approach every work as something to decode, the first question became, “What does it mean?”— as though its value lay in some hidden message waiting to be extracted and restated elsewhere. For Sontag, this is precisely what taming means: neutralizing what is intrinsic to a work, what cannot be reduced to a concept, in order to render it harmless. At bottom, this is what she calls “the philistine refusal to leave the work of art alone.” Interpretation risked extinguishing the immediate, sensory impact that a work has on those who hear or see it — an experience that is essential and prior to any content one might later extract from it. We therefore conceive these titles not as content to be extracted from the music, but as biographical traces of ourselves. They do not assign meaning to the listening experience; rather, they point to those who made the music. The decision to title and dedicate these pieces to villages destroyed during the Nakba came only afterward, once the music already existed, but not in order to impose an external meaning upon it. Rather, it was an acknowledgment that those improvisations had already been traversed by our own anxieties, by the anger and grief we felt in the face of the unspeakable. The title does not explain the music; it names the condition of those who created it. In the liner notes you write that, while art cannot stop violence, it also cannot remain isolated from the world. That raises a broader question about artistic responsibility. When working on an entirely improvised album, how do you negotiate the relationship between political intention and musical openness? Were there moments where you felt the music itself resisted the conceptual framework you had established, or did improvisation become precisely the right language for responding to events that seem almost impossible to represent? Free improvisation is probably the musical practice in which the performer’s life, emotions, thoughts, and memories enter the musical act most directly. Not by narrating events, but by allowing the sound itself to reveal a presence of one’s inner world that precedes any explanation. Unlike composed music, the outcome of improvisation is always bound to the hic et nunc of the self, and of the self in relation to the other. The environment, one’s state of mind, one’s thoughts, and interpersonal relationships are all integral to the construction of the music. They do not constitute an external context; they are among the very materials of improvisation. For Christopher Small, music is not so much an object as a shared activity — a process of musicking that encompasses performers, listeners, and the relationships that emerge between them in the moment of performance. If there is a political dimension, it is enacted within this network of relationships that comes into being every time people make music together. Pauline Oliveros described Deep Listening as the practice of “listening in every possible way to everything possible to hear.” For us, this means that improvisation is not merely about producing sounds, but about assuming the responsibility of being fully present: listening to one another, to the space, and to the world. It is a mode of listening that precedes expressive intention and also entails a willingness to be transformed by whatever unfolds. For this reason, we have never experienced any tension between political commitment and musical openness. As we suggested earlier, lived experience inevitably enters the sound itself, and precisely for that reason we believe free improvisation is the language best suited to engaging with events that exceed every possibility of representation. Faced with tragedies of this magnitude, music neither can nor should claim to narrate, explain, or stand in for history. What it can do is become a space in which such experiences continue to question both those who perform and those who listen. According to Jacques Rancière, the politics of art does not reside in the message it conveys, but in the way it reconfigures the distribution of the sensible — that is, what can be seen, heard, and shared. In a complementary sense, Jacques Attali argued that music is prophecy: rather than merely reflecting society, it heralds forms that have not yet become visible elsewhere, in a movement he calls annunciatory. If this is true, then a record such as this does not simply “comment” on tragedy through its titles. Rather, in the very way it is organized and experienced, it attempts to imagine a different configuration of reality. For this reason, we do not believe in the possibility of neutral art. The autonomy of music does not mean isolation from history. Every sonic gesture emerges within a network of relationships, experiences, and responsibilities. In this sense, it is not so much that music “speaks about politics”; rather, sound itself, as a human gesture situated in the world, inevitably possesses a political dimension. Sound is political. Compared to your previous duo album All’improvviso, the instrumentation here has been reduced to its bare essentials: electric cello and analogue synthesizer. Yet that apparent limitation produces an extraordinarily rich sonic vocabulary, where it often becomes difficult to distinguish which sounds belong to the cello and which emerge from the synthesizer. How has your musical dialogue evolved since your first collaboration, and what possibilities did this more austere instrumental setup open up for both of you? We both share the need to constantly question ourselves and to explore new ways of discovering sound within sound. This happens both individually, through our own personal research, and collectively in our work as a duo. By “new means” we do not simply refer to different devices or instruments, as was the case with our first album, All’Improvviso, but also to new expressive possibilities that emerge from a deeper exploration of each instrument itself. Sometimes, innovation does not come from adding new elements, but from looking more deeply at what is already available to us and questioning our habitual ways of using it. Our decision to reduce the instrumentation to an electric cello and an analogue synthesizer was therefore not an act of renunciation, but part of this very process: a way of focusing our attention on sonic material itself. Limiting our means — both in terms of instruments and musical materials — has never felt like a constraint. On the contrary, it creates a deeper space for exploration, where every timbral variation, every resonance, and every subtle detail acquires greater significance. Giacinto Scelsi spoke of the profondeur du son — the depth of sound — conceiving sound not merely as a vehicle for music but as an autonomous universe to be explored in its own internal complexity. From this perspective, our interest is not simply in combining the electric cello and the analogue synthesizer as two distinct instruments, but in exploring the point at which their identities begin to dissolve and sound becomes a shared space, a material in continuous transformation. This exploration unfolds through a process of exchange and reciprocity, ideally reaching a point where the distinction between the two sound sources no longer matters. The fact that it is often difficult to tell whether a particular sound originates from the cello or the synthesizer is therefore not merely the result of each of us pursuing our own timbral research. Rather, it is the outcome of an encounter between two depths: both instruments become generators of a shared sonic material, continuously transformed through listening, interaction, and mutual responsiveness. Listening to Improvisations for the Land, I was struck by how much the music relies on restraint. Silence, resonance, and microscopic changes in timbre often carry as much expressive weight as the more overt musical gestures, while the dialogue between electric cello and analogue synthesizer unfolds with remarkable patience and responsiveness. At many points it becomes difficult to tell where one instrument ends and the other begins, as both seem to inhabit the same evolving sonic space. How do you cultivate that degree of mutual listening during improvisation? Is it something that develops over years of playing together, or do you deliberately create conditions that allow unexpected musical relationships to emerge in the moment? Although a musical relationship can certainly be built and deepened over time through shared experience and growing familiarity, there are also rare encounters in which something seems to happen immediately, before words and without the need for any particular preparation. These are the moments when a musical dialogue emerges from the very first sound, as a form of mutual recognition. That epiphany is exactly what happened the first time we played together as a duo. All’improvviso, our first album, grew out of that experience: a first meeting, with no rehearsal, no predetermined structures, and no direction established in advance. We simply brought our willingness to listen and to respond to whatever unfolded in the present moment. Ever since that first encounter, we have had the feeling that our shared sound has always found its own continuity, its own direction, while remaining completely open. Of course, this sense of affinity does not imply the absence of research or risk. On the contrary, within such a deep mode of listening, the unexpected becomes an essential source of creative energy. What we do not know is not an obstacle but an opportunity for transformation. Improvisation ultimately lives within this tension between familiarity and the unknown. Writing about non-idiomatic improvisation, Derek Bailey argued that the value of this practice lies precisely in not knowing in advance what will happen. It is not defined by the absence of an idiom, but by the decision to relinquish any pre-existing idiom in order to remain in the position of discovering something together with another person. We recognize the foundation of our own listening to one another in that condition, more than in any acquired technique. For us, improvisation means exposing ourselves to the risk of losing what we already know, accepting that control can never be total, and allowing space for something that can emerge only through the relationship itself. It is precisely this dimension of risk that keeps the musical dialogue alive and vital. In this sense, listening is not simply the ability to follow the other; it is also the willingness to allow the other to change the course of our own path. (Gianmarco Del Re)