Gentle Fire Basel is a rework made with Ivan Liuzzo initiated in 2021, based on Alvin Lucier’s composition Gentle Fire (1971). The piece consists in transforming a sound image, present in a list, into another sound image, part of a second list.

This process should be slow and clear. Some sound ‘images’ written in the lists are sound events from the environment, others are speculative and imaginative.

[…] For me those lists were ways of making beautiful scores. I thought of them as poetry. […] ‘Some of the lists remind me of dreams…’

(Chambers, Alvin Lucier. Simon Douglas)

Our rework focus within the spaces of sound sources, or the “images,” evaluated in its real, physical context - considering its relationship and interaction with the environment and any unforeseen elements, including its characteristics and the enrichment or impoverishment derived from interacting with a “lit” or “dimmed” environment.

The sound source (or the sound image) is not treated as a pure and ideal sound object but is situated within a polyphonic, heterophonic “choral” system, where it can be the most prominent, marginal, or momentary in part. The microphone became a means of transforma- tion - or at least a point of transition - between the sound images, while serving as an aesthetic tool that shapes and interacts with the very concept of the image and its surroundings.

see also the artist book dedicated to this project

Performed:

02-04/10/2025 FOG FESTIVAL, Basel (CH) 15/03/2024 AKUT, Basel (CH)