Sessions was composed in Venice between 2021 and 2023, emerging from a series of improvisations built around a deliberately limited setup.
At the centre of the recordings is a Monome Norns Shield, used not simply as an instrument but as a system through which musical decisions could be generated, constrained and transformed. Dynamic range, tonality, harmony and, at times, even timbre are shaped by scripts, allowing predetermined structures and unpredictable events to coexist.
Rather than composing each piece in a conventional linear way, the sessions began from simple sets of rules. These rules establish a field of possibilities: sounds repeat, mutate and drift; harmonic relationships gradually appear and disappear; small variations accumulate until the original material takes on a different form.
Additional layers of analogue synthesizers were later recorded in the studio, extending the material generated during the original sessions without erasing its improvised character.
The album was made during a period spent in Venice, and the environment gradually became part of its conception. The movement of the lagoon, its tides and its changing relationship with the moon suggested a parallel with the music itself: continuously evolving surfaces originating from simple underlying structures.
Like the water of the lagoon responding to forces that remain largely invisible, the slowly shifting pads and harmonies of Sessions unfold from the instructions of a binary system.
The result is less a collection of conventionally composed tracks than a document of a process, seven recordings situated somewhere between improvisation, generative composition and ambient music.
Sessions was released by Ruvido Records on November 24, 2023.
Written, produced and mastered by The Progressive Ruin.