Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun), by David Fennessy

Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun)

by David Fennessy

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Includes unlimited streaming via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality downloads of Caruso, Looking for Daniel, Fragments, Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun), Handmade Series Vol. 01 Douceurs, Ridgeway, Ice In A Hot World, Amiandos, and 46 more. , and , .

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Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun) 23:35

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In the 1982 movie Fitzcarraldo, Werner Herzog's main character is obsessed with Enrico Caruso’s voice “silencing all the pain and all the voices of the primeval forest and drowning out all birdsong.” Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun) by irish composer David Fennessy is an extended fantasy, “born of the delirium of the jungle,” as the German director would have it, and inspired by the extraordinary voice of the legendary italian tenor.

What a strange sound it is when the heroic tenor reaches, then holds his highest note. A super-human feat. The voice becomes detached from the body, indeed it sounds barely human. A string stretched almost to the point of breaking, it reaches the threshold of the imaginable:

“I wanted to stretch it further, loop it, pervert it even, until it became something surreal and clearly unnatural. Then to dive into that moment and bathe in it.” _ David Fennessy

The music in Caruso (Gold is the Sweat of the Sun) is almost completely made up of very short extracts from gramophone recordings of the Italian tenor opera singer Enrico Caruso (1873-1921)
between 1903 and 1908, which are looped, stretched and combined to form a kind of ‘choir.' The electric guitar is a representation of an obsessive, creative force at the centre of it all - enveloped by, soothed by, railing against and sometimes overpowered by the relentless river of sound of the myriad of voices.

This piece is part of the album 'Caruso,' that will be released on Unsounds records on March 5 2024.

credits

released November 2, 2023

Electric guitars, autoharp, frog guiros - David Fennessy
Samples, live electronics - Pete Dowling

Recorded and mixed by Pete Dowling
Mastered by Yannis Kyriakides 2023
Recorded at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, August 2016
Published by Universal Edition, Vienna
Design Isabelle Vigier, illustration based on: Enrico Caruso around 1918, glass negative, George Grantham Bain Collection (Library of Congress) Washington, D.C.
Copyright David Fennessy /Unsound 2023

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Unsounds Label Amsterdam, Netherlands

Music label for contemporary composition, experimental, improvisation, sound art. Unsounds was founded in 2001 by guitarist Andy Moor (The Ex), composer/sound artist Yannis Kyriakides, and designer/visual artist Isabelle Vigier.

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