One of Black Sweat Records’ latest releases is Concert For Bats, Voices And Natural Sounds, a singular work by artist Mariolina Zitta. This album is the culmination of Zitta’s journey into sound, which began in the late 1980s as she approached the world of natural sounds through her studies in musicology and a developing passion for speleology. Her encounter with Walter Maioli was fundamental, guiding and influencing her definitive research into sound archaeology and the primitive sources of musical acoustic phenomena.
In these recordings, Mariolina conducts a magical ritual as a cave priestess, celebrating the icons par excellence of the mysteries of the night: bats. The specific frequencies of the calls of these fascinating creatures are recorded with special detectors used by ecologists, with the result being a truly organic synthesiser. This is fused with the sounds of natural objects—including stones, stalactites, logs, bone whistles, Tibetan bells, mouth bows, and trumpet shells. Zitta’s own vocal modulations and harmonic singing allow the listener to travel into a still unexplored sound dimension, through an evocative experience of total sensory listening. It is an arcane landscape filled with pure vibrations, magnetic resonances, and aquatic sounds; an ancestral enchantment on the border between consciousness and dreams, a symbolic liturgy of primordial reverberations, echoes, and whistles.
This unique release is strictly limited to an edition of 200 copies.