Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino Capra Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi Archetti, Valerio Tricoli, etc. First appearing on the label’s offshoot, Blume Editions in 2016, “Movimenti Lunari”, the Milanese guitarist/composer, Alessandra Novaga, has remained an artist central to Die Schachtel’s deep dedication to the contemporary context of experimental sound practice. In 2020, they issued the second exploration of her love of film, “I Should Have Been a Gardener”, rooted in the work of Derek Jarman. Now, having consistently expanded her singular sound over numerous releases over the four years since, Novaga returns to Die Schachtel with “The Artistic Is Always a Miracle”, the third instalment of her “film” series, this time drawing inspiration from the life and work of the Russian director / auteur Andrej Tarkovsky and the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. Comprising two sides of shimmering, tense compositions, this stunning LP - issued in a very limited edition of 300 copies on turquoise 180 gr. heavyweight vinyl, with an extensive extensive booklet, and coming with a digital download of the album available on your Soundohm account - amounts to as one of the most creatively ambitious and conceptually rich outings to date by one of the most exciting artists working within experimental music today.

Alessandra Novaga - classically trained at the Musik Akademie in Basel, Switzerland - stands among the leading figures within northern Italy’s thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, consistently rendering striking solo efforts for imprints like Die Schachtel, Blume Editions, Setola di Maiale, and Coherent States - as well embarking upon equally noteworthy collaborations with Loren Connors, Stefano Pilia, Elliott Sharp, Nicola Ratti, Paula Matthusen, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, Francesco Gagliardi, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward-thinking, her approach to the guitar - slowly emerging over the better part of the last decade - veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instruments applications within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, encountering her relentlessly deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone, creating a deeply personal and emotive music that seeks narrative and meaning within the abstractions of sound.

The seeds of “The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle” can be traced to a conversation that Novaga had with Alan Licht relating to the connections between music and cinema, which led her to consider Andrej Tarkovsky’s use of Bach's music within a symbiotic framework: how the music illuminates the imagism of the films, and the film illuminates new dimensions of the music. Slowly developing over the subsequent years, the resulting album comprises six individual works, some of which draw directly upon pieces of Bach’s music that Tarkovsky used in his films - specifically “Erbarme dich, Mein Gott”, “Das alte Jahr vergangen ist”, and “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ” - while others draw upon the sensibilities and moods evoked in the imagination by the director’s films.

“The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle” can be understood as a realisation of a collectivism that Tarkovsky sought within his own work and of others that existed in the service of something far beyond the expression of self. Encountering Novaga moving into fairly uncharted waters, three of the album’s pieces incorporate the human voice: that of the poet Arsenij Tarkovsky, the director’s father; a singer from Bach’s “Erbarme dich, Mein Gott”, capturing a broadcast in an underground parking lot, and Novaga’s own, rendering the melody from Bach’s “Ich ruf zu dir, Herr Jesu Christ”.

Roughly alternating between solo excursions on guitar and bristling electroacoustic pieces, over the course of the album’s two sides Novaga weaves one of her most abstract and ambitious bodies of recordings to date, shifting between the complex tonal meditations generated by the six strings of her instrument, and phsycological densities activated by the expanded pallet of sonority made possible by the tactics and approaches of musique concrète.

An immersive, deeply engaging meeting of beauty and melancholy within a labyrinth of voices and ideas, “The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle” transfigures the life and work of Andrej Tarkovsky - one of the greatest auteur in the history of cinema - into a singular, experimental statement of collective truth. Belonging to recent, ambitious stream of releases on Die Schachtel that’s already included Novaga’s “I Should Have Been a Gardener”, Stefano Pilia’s “Spiralis Aurea”, Jim O'Rourke & Giovanni Di Domenico’s “Immanent In Nervous Activity”, Claudio Rocchetti’s “Labirinto Verticale”, and Damāvand’s “As Long as You Come To My Garden”, among others, Alessandra Novaga’s “The Artistic Image Is Always a Miracle” - issued in a very limited edition of 300 copies on turquoise 180 gr. heavyweight vinyl, with an extensive extensive booklet, and coming with a digital download of the album available on your Soundohm account - witnesses one of the great voices in contemporary Italian experiential music rendering one of her most visionary bodies of music to date.