Four short stories written and read by Ginevra Bompiani with music by Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage.

In Italian literature and thinking Bompiani is a highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist and academic, whose fiction in particular is informed by linguistics, feminism and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making this interdisciplinary effort with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music entirely logical.

The four stories were recorded at her home in 2018 by Francesco Cavaliere; they were originally published in her 1975 volume Le Specie del Sonno, with an introduction by Italo Calvino, who wrote that “the landscape created by her prose recalls those paintings in which peaceful figures are asleep in a quiet wood, or a solitary house, or any place where the senses can dim and reason's guard is dropped.”

The texts she reads dive into the mystical world of myth and allegory, bringing traces of the ancient world and mind alive in the contemporary realm. Against the delivery of her voice, the four pieces are threaded by music. Sauvage's two contributions, I frutti and Il serpente d'acqua, were composed, performed and recorded at a research centre in Paris and build upon her broader body of work incorporating the sounds of amplified water, drawing haunting sonorities and textures howling from unknown depths. Barbieri's two pieces, Il calore animale and La pariglia, encounter the composer returning to the classical guitar, unfurling rippling arpeggios, patterns and melodic elements into the world created by the writer's words.

Beautiful and deeply original, while calling the mind back both to the ancient world and to earlier moments in cross-disciplinary collaboration such as the music fables from which the inspiration for this new series was drawn, it is a stunning and deeply inspiring body of work, recommended for anyone captivated by myth, sound art, sound poetry and experimental music at large.