Limited edition of 59 copies (!) An additional 100 copies are signed and numbered by Dario Calderone and only available through him at art events and concerts. Isolario is a cycle of 9 duets, which can be performed, or just imagined, by any instrument or voice. The inspiration of these compositions comes from a compilation of texts by medieval writers from the “Arabic” world, describing a special and wonder-full island. Beyond the fact that these islands really exist, what interests me is the description of the extraordinary, and how the “magical thinking” has shaped the imagination of the medieval navigators, creating recurrent spaces which survived until our contemporary culture. I chose texts that described a behaviour, or a sociological attitude, that could be transposed into a musical context. The scores consist in a textual part and in a visual part; the music resides in the clash between these 2 sorts of material.

The visual part of the scores consist of my versions of pre-existing maps from the medieval Arab and Persian tradition of KMMS. The use of these non-mimetic maps, was certainly not for navigation, as in the case of the modern ones, but they had an iconographic use: they could be defined as carto-ideographs. Therefore, these pictures can be seen not as descriptions of territories but rather as spaces, in a very similar way as graphic scores do not necessarily describe the final auditive result. My versions of these maps insert in the tradition of inexact copies of copies; nevertheless, they have been bonded to my musical necessities, and therefore transformed into musical graphic scores.

Dario Calderone is a double bass player, improviser, and composer based in Amsterdam. His music personality has developed over more than 20 years by working in strict collaborations with Stefano Scodanibbio, Roberth Ashley, Christian Marclay, Salvatore Sciarrino, Yannis Kyriakides, Peter Ablinger, Berhard Lang, Giorgio Netti and Beat Furrer.
From 2009 to 2019 he has been the bass player of the Nieuw Ensemble (NL). He is currently member of Nieuw Amsterdam Peil (NL), Trio Feedback (ES), and MAZE (NL).

Dario Calderone: double bass, composition
Tomas Järmir: drums (on track 1)
Neva Özgen: kemençe (on track 2)
Barbara Ellison: electronics (on track 3)
Andy Moor: electric guitar (on track 4)
Kiya Tabassian: setar (on track 5)
Gareth Davis: bass clarinet and electronics (on track 6)
Deborah Walker: cello (on track 7)
Batir Dosimbetov: nay and electronics (on track 8)

Recorded at Amsterdam (Studio Z and Zaal 100),
Tröndheim, Istanbul, Dublin, Cologne (Funkhaus Köln), Berlin and Tashkent in winter/spring 2022.
Produced and Mastered by Dario Calderone.
Mastered by Jos Smolders at EARLabs