Since their founding in 2000, the Bologna based cultural platform, Xing, has worked tirelessly in support of objects and events that embrace an interdisciplinary approach toward the issues of contemporary culture. More recently, their record label has expanded this initiative to amplify the voices of artists - both Italian and international - who are deeply engaged in the world of live performativity, a modus operandi that has now been offered even more focus with their latest series, Xong, a vinyl-only collection that explores a geography of artists who present the sonic field as a means to expand their staging of free standing, intimate worlds. Easily some of the most exciting recordings we’ve heard in recent years, the series, via LPs like Lydia Mancinelli and Marcello Maloberti’s “Martellate. Scritti Fighi 1990-2020”, Kinkaleri and Jacopo Benassi’s “Once More”, Luciano Maggiore’s “Very Cheap Non-Human Animal Imitations”, and Margherita Morgantin’s “Cosmic Silence 5, Fluorescence 4” - have taken us on a deep dive into a creative frontier that rests at the borders of the theatrical, sound art, experimental music, noise, the poetic, and the generatively performative. Their latest, “A Circle of Grey”, is a brand-new offering from none other than Valerio Tricoli.

A stunning gesture of contemporary electroacoustic composition that deploys a unique sonic palette to reflect experiences balanced between tangibility and abstraction, once again Tricoli has managed to blow our minds. Issued by Xong in two very special editions - 150 numbered copies on white vinyl, and a collector’s edition of 20 copies, numbered and signed by the artist, that includes a unique tape loop (2 min), each developed from a different sonic fragment of the record. Like everything Xing does, this one is an absolute must.

Over the last two decades, the Palermo born, Munich based composer, Valerio Tricoli, has forged a singular path within experimental sound practice, continuously rethinking the relationship between electroacoustic composition and narrative possibility. Exploring auditory phenomena and the narrative potential of electronic and acoustic sound sources, Tricoli’s work - as it has appeared across a carefully executed body of solo recordings, as well as noteworthy collaborations with Stefano Pilia, Dean Roberts, Thomas Ankersmit, Hanno Leichtmann, Werner Dafeldecker and numerous others - rests at the shadowy juncture of internal and external worlds; a meeting place where the synthetic and organic give way to utterances of the existential, psychological, physical, and occult.

Most commonly created on a reel-to-reel tape machine - manipulating, live sampling, and real-time editing / mixing of field and studio recordings - Tricoli's works stand at the outer reaches of contemporary electroacoustic sound practice, pushing toward realms of creative possibility that have previously remained unconsidered and unseen.

“A Circle of Grey”, Tricoli’s seventh solo full-length, is a long-form electroacoustic composition rooted in the long-standing relationship with his Revox B77. Deploying his chosen tool to manipulate sounds and synthesizer textures and tones, like the majority of the composer’s work, the piece is led by ideas and considerations rather than a conception of a particular objective sound, in this case blending philosophical contemplation on transience, impermanence, and creative musical exploration.

Via the work’s unique sonic palette of pointillistic, granular texture, shifting long-tones, and bristling ambiances, Tricoli integrates a vast range of technical approaches into a tense sonorous landscape, shifting between haunting, dry, broken, and deserted realms, where sounds shimmer between the surface and the deepest depths of the aural field.

Revealing itself like ever-changing reflections of broken glass, across the length of “A Circle of Grey” the composer enters a state of timeless wandering - using circularity and subtle variations in timbre and dynamics to create a sense of depth and progression aimed to transcend linear time - and leans toward interpretative ambiguity somewhere between its existential themes and states of beauty and hope.

Brilliant and endlessly engaging, once again Valerio Tricoli shows us the way with his latest monumental offering “A Circle of Grey”. Yet another incredible release joining the already fantastic catalog of Xong, it is issued in two very special editions - 150 numbered copies on white vinyl, and a collector’s edition of 20 copies, numbered and signed by the artist, that includes a unique tape loop (2 min), each developed from a different sonic fragment of the record. Truly amazing and not to be missed.