Il Calore Animale

Ginevra Bompiani is most likely unknown for fans of experiential music. In Italian literature and thinking, however, she is highly regarded writer, editor, translator, essayist, and academic, whose fiction, particularly, is informed by linguistics, feminism, and literary theory, and verges on the surreal and the fantastic, making her interdisciplinary effort, ‘Il Calore Animale’, collaborating with two of the most singular voices in contemporary experimental music – Caterina Barbieri and Tomoko Sauvage – entirely logical
The LP, ‘Il Calore Animale’ comprises four short stories read by Ginevra Bompiani, recorded at her home in 2018 by Francesco Cavaliere, that were originally published in her volume ‘Le Specie del Sonno’ (The Species of Sleep) in 1975 with an introduction by Italo Calvino, where he stated “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 that Bompiani reads dive into the mystical world of myth and allegory, bring traces of the ancient world and mind alive in the contemporary realm. Against the delivery of her voice, the four pieces are threaded by musical pieces composed by Tomoko Sauvage and Caterina Barbieri. Sauvage’s two contributions, “I frutti” and “Il serpente d’acqua”, were composed, performed, and recorded at INA GRM – Groupe de Recherches Musicales 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” – other the other hand, encounter the composer returning to the classical guitar, unfurling rippling arpeggios, patterns, and melodic elements into the world created by Bompiani’s words