Li Song / Luciano Maggiore ~ toppe bianche 白色补丁

Listening to “adventurous” music can be a hazardous activity. It often prompts a familiar question from unsuspecting visitors: “What is this noise?” toppe bianche 白色补丁 by Li Song / Luciano Maggiore begins precisely at that point of uncertainty, asking not only how one should listen to a work, but whether listening can ever be separated from the circumstances in which it takes place. Recorded beneath the railway arches and across the marshes of Walthamstow, London, the album functions as a negotiation between portable electronics, passing trains, weather, wildlife, and human activity. Consisting of two long-form mirror pieces, “/ * /” and “* / *“, the album is built around simple materials: glissandi, friction-like textures, environmental sounds, and interludes of white noise. The title, which translates as “White Patches”, refers to the masking processes used in post-production and the way the different sounds are connected. Trains become white noise, while birdsong, distant conversations, footsteps and accidental events drift in and out of focus. As the artists themselves insist, there is no background here. Everything is present all the time. What soon becomes apparent is the way toppe bianche 白色补丁 refuses to privilege any single element. The portable speakers generating the glissandi are no more important than the arch itself, the trains overhead, or the occasional passer-by. The music exists in a state between composition and improvisation, intention and accident. The sounds feel fragile, yet stubbornly present. They neither demand attention nor disappear entirely. For those not having a tape deck, headphones might reveal the intricate layering of the recording. Personally, I feel the album especially rewarding when played through my laptop speakers in an ordinary domestic environment especially on hot summer days. With windows open, street noise, birds outside, distant traffic, even the hum of household appliances become inadvertent extensions of the piece. In this sense, Toppe Bianche is not simply a recording but a framework for listening. Like the cliché of the tree falling in the forest, it raises questions about perception and presence. The glissandi may occasionally vanish beneath trains, white noise or the sounds of one’s own surroundings, but they continue to exist. That quiet insistence may be the album’s most radical gesture. In the following interview conducted by email Li Song and Luciano Maggiore elaborate on the production process. This recording was made beneath the railway arches and across the marshes of Walthamstow, with passing trains becoming an integral part of the sound world. Rather than attempting to isolate yourselves from the environment, you chose to add white noise and work with it. How did the location shape the music, and at what point did the surrounding sounds cease to be “background” and become collaborators in the piece? Luciano Maggiore: The simple fact that we chose to use that arch in the marshes says a lot about how much we wanted the recording to be entangled with the place. It’s a place we both know quite well, having been the location of a small, almost spontaneous festival of experimental music organised by a few friends and us some years ago. The main characters in the work are, of course, the sounds produced by us during the acts of recording and post-production, but the flesh of the pieces, and the world they inhabit, is that arch itself, with its inhabitants and all the accidents imposed by the surrounding sonic life. There is no background. Everything is present all the time. Li Song: Both Luciano and I are quite familiar with the space itself. A couple of years back, the two of us and some friends did an outdoor show under the exact same arch. We both live near the marshes but in opposite directions, so I wouldn’t be surprised if the arch is actually the midpoint between our homes in London. When we decided to record outdoors, that was the first space that came to mind. I think the location sort of designed the piece, in a way we didn’t expect it to at the start. We had chatted about the idea of masking very early on, which is putting one audio signal on top of another to cover it up. But then we sort of forgot about it and went down the route of recording glissandos under the arch. Later on, while working with the recordings, the idea came back to us. The white noise masking, around and over with the train, holds the pieces together. The album is described as existing between composition and improvisation, and between human dialogue and environmental processes. Can you talk about how decisions were made during the recording? Were there agreed structures, or did the piece emerge through listening and reacting to each other, the trains, and the acoustics of the space? LM: The pieces had a backbone that was decided a priori: the use of glissandos, a series of movements through the space, and a range of frequencies we could work with in both pieces. Decisions were then made in situ, following recording attempts and small trials and errors, to understand whether the choices made beforehand suited the situation we found ourselves in. I would say the core idea was to use digital glissandos and, later, fields of white noise to mask certain parts of the recordings. Li Song built a simple piece of software that was easy to control, with an array of parameters (frequency and duration, if I remember correctly). We performed with the software using our phones, each connected to an identical Bluetooth speaker. LS: If I remember correctly, we only had the moving glissando idea and the location planned out. We left pretty much everything else to the day of the recording. Both of us are quite flexible and just open to seeing what happens. I had programmed an oscillator app on a webpage so we could use our portable speakers to generate the glissando sounds. That’s the continuous sound you hear in the recordings, where you can change the pitch range and certain timing settings. On the day, I showed Luciano how to use it, and we briefly talked about how we would move around the space. We did maybe two or three sessions with different settings and configurations. I feel like as we recorded the latter half, we started improvising more and ignoring the rules we had set at the beginning. After that, we just went home to listen back and work on it later. It was during that later process that we had the masking idea with white noise to go along with the train sounds. It didn’t take us long to find an alternative way to mask the other track, and I think the two tracks work better together. Li, your work with No Performance often seeks to minimise the presence of the performer, while Luciano’s practice frequently examines performance itself, repetition, endurance and the theatricality of sound production. How did these seemingly different approaches interact during this collaboration? Did either of you find yourselves working outside your usual habits? LM: Even though our approaches may appear different, both of us perform in various formations that use performativity as a way of staging situations involving sound. Li Song often performs with the artist Mengting Zhuo, and both of us are part of a trio with On Yee Lo, among other collaborations. I would say that neither of us felt in any way out of place 🙂 LS: The ‘No Performance’ idea actually started out as a series of experiments that Zhu Wenbo and I were doing in Beijing back in 2015. We were doing pieces where the computer listened to acoustic instruments and did its own thing according to the program we had designed beforehand. It was maybe a half-joke to name it ‘No Performance’ because I would just start the program and sit there doing nothing. To be honest, we eventually explored other ideas beyond this style. So it’s not some strict rule I follow throughout all my music. Having said that, I do feel I have grown more attached to the idea of letting things perform by ‘themselves.’ I do believe that somehow shows in this music too. Maybe you could say the different approaches work in different dimensions. I think our approaches overlap more than what it looks like. The liner notes mention a desire to create a music that “eschews self-awareness in favour of a supernatural imbalance.” That is a striking phrase. What does “supernatural imbalance” mean to you in this context? Is it connected to unpredictability, to the agency of the environment, or to a more philosophical idea of dissolving control? LM: That’s a beautiful way of describing the work, but we can’t really claim ownership of the phrase. I think I understand what Cai and Yizhuo (the owners of Aloe) are implying with it, but I would rather leave any explanation to them. LS: To me, my first impression when hearing the track after we add the studio material was actually a sense of balance. Just like the album title, the patch holds things together. Listening to the album, there are moments where it becomes difficult to distinguish between performer, device, environmental sound and recording artefact. Both of your practices seem interested in questioning authorship and intentionality. Do you see this blurring of boundaries as a political gesture, an aesthetic one, or simply the most honest way of engaging with sound today? LM: I’m not sure about honesty. I don’t personally think of what I do as particularly political. There are, of course, other, more effective ways of making a statement than using music to do so. I’m conscious that every position I take in this world carries political value and therefore implies a certain stance. However, I am concerned with music making and the ways in which it can be staged. I believe in making music for music’s sake. LS: I think this is just naturally how we work. With computer or electronic music, there’s a huge appreciation for high-fidelity audio and how many channels you have in your system. For me, ever since my time in Beijing, I’ve performed with my laptop in people’s living rooms, playing through a bunch of cheap small speakers I found for 30 RMB each on Taobao. Not everyone has access to a 16-channel speaker system, and more importantly, there’s just music for laptop speakers. Luciano and I also worked together on the ‘unspecified unspecified unspecified’ concert series in London for a year after COVID. We had this rule of self-amplification, where performers were solely responsible for amplifying their own sound if they needed to. I suppose that’s also related to this idea: people working with their own things, in the space they are given. What is the significance of the title toppe bianche 白色补丁? LM: The Italian toppe bianche can be roughly translated into English as “white patches”. I believe that 白色补丁 is read and understood in more or less the same way. LS: I already referred to title holding things in the above answers, it matches what we were doing with the studio material in the end. (Gianmarco Del Re)