Milan based Die Schachtel presents In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni (We turn round in the night and, behold, we are consumed by Fire) - a work for solo guitar by the Italian composer Stefano Pilia, the second release to appear on a new series from the imprint - Decay Music, highlighting inspired contemporary experimental efforts in the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract.

Born in Genoa and based in Bologna, Pilia is a guitar player and electro-acoustic composer concerned with the sculptural properties of sound, offering particular focus to its relationship to space, memory, and the suspension of time - the conceptual undercurrent of In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni. Comprised of corresponding compositional triptychs on each of its two sides - the final act of both featuring contributions from experimental music heavyweights, Rodrigo D’Erasmo on violin and David Grubbs on piano, the album builds vast, inhabitable expanses of ambience from long tones and shattered cuts and collisions, punctuated by clusters, sweeps, and careful interventions of texture and note. In Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni – as this eerie palindrome and endecasillabo (a syntactic form in classical Italian verse) from Virgil suggests – moves through a path of alchemical symbolic narratives and poetic abstraction humbly reminiscent and allegorically inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy and by the Nekyia (‘evocation of the dead’) parts found in Book IX of Homer’s Odyssey.

Based on symmetrical harmonic, melodic and narrative properties and filled with intangible narrative, haunting abstraction, fleeting visions of eerie space, and slow motion melody, Girum Imus Nocte Et Consumimur Igni pushes electroacoustic music toward symphonic dimensions - dramatic arcs with echoes of high Minimalism, historic ambient music, and the radicalism indeterminate forms. Through a wise, peculiar and abstracted use of guitar instrumentation, the sound surface of the compositions reaches deeper electroacoustic-symphonic dimensions, echoing minimalist works, ambient music and indeterminate contemporary forms. The perfectly sounding Decay Music records have been perfectly cut and pressed using a surprising thick grey hi-quality vinyl featuring a "decay-like" marbling effect. The overall design is by the usual suspect Bruno Stucchi/dinamomilano.com, who created a "half alchemic-half decadent" custom typeface for the series. The covers - featuring mysterious and obscure drawings by obscure artists – are printed in silver on heavy matt black paper stock, and hosted in a transparent outer sleeve, on which the typography is silkscreened in white on clear acetate.
Issued on vinyl in a edition of 250 copies and pressed to 180g marble vinyl, housed in pro-printed inner sleeve and jacket, itself contained in a silkscreened pvc sleeve