Se tu porti il vino, io faccio il pesto

Programme Note

Se tu porti il vino, io faccio il pesto

Written for the occasion of Roberto Doati's retirement celebration in Piacenza on December 18th 2020, this piece uses samples Roberto very kindly shared with me of various stages of the wine-making process, including some very juicy hydrophone recordings. As he and I—as well as Giacomo Lepri, who co-organised the occasion—share a love of Pesto alla Genovese, I couldn't resist recording and combining some of my own samples of a mortar and pestle with Roberto's wine samples to make this piece.

Because I live in the frozen north and it was already autumn, the mortar was empty of basil leaves and thus made highly exciting, stony, high frequency percussion effects when attacked with the pestle. (An emphasis on higher frequencies is perfect for old men like us though, even if I do apologise to the youngsters in advance, if they feel my mix is a little too `top heavy').

Oh, and of course, given that Roberto and I first met in Padova in 1995 and had a heated discussion about the contemporary relevance of granular synthesis techniques, I fed lots of samples not only through sequencing algorithms but also through my granular synthesis software in real-time. In performing this, I made similar gestures with the mouse as I would when grinding pesto, only here the movement was mapped to spatialisation (ambisonics) as well as many other parameters such as grain length and transposition, instead of basil. Salute e buon appetito!