Mario Crispi, composer, player of wind instruments and founder of Agricantus band (the most important italian world fusion band), had an intense activity as a soloist, realizing concert and performances in which he colleague archaic wind instruments to computers and microprocessors.
With this experience, he realized the project “Soffi “(breath, blows). This project is an “investigation” of multiples and indefinites sounding worlds through musical instruments (naturals, archaics and digitals) that transform the air, wind and breath in a variety of sounds and timbres.

Mario Crispi expand its research in a meaningful way by looking through the sounds suggested by the instruments used to describe “uncharted” territories but, at the same time, also possible. In this musical concept, Crispi gives the same importance to ancestral computers and flutes: the role of the “instrument” is subject to the creativity and at the symbolism, without any exaltation of the modern technology. The idea is a performance by “one man band”, much used today, but where the listener is accompanied in a sound exploration, to a” continuous becoming “of horizons and continually crossed boundaries, like the winds that blow in all directions.

The performance

The performance is a concert where the archaic wind instruments are played and mixed through a dsp, looper, echoes and delays of a laptop. These audio digital tools are dedicated to recording samples in real time (normally called looper), harmonization (which is achieved by creating entries and fragmented melody performed in intervals scalar) and running the sound (produced by compressors, filters, echo and reverb). Although these dsp modify the nature of sound of the archaic instruments, they, adding to the particular tone of the musical instruments, producing spatial depth and different from the original, realizing an very evocative ambience and oniric soundscape. Furthermore, some archaic wind instruments, are played with circular breathing: a particular breathing technique when the player to perform tunes ad libitum, without interrupting the sound where to catch your breath.

The instrumentation

The instrumentation used in the concert is:

– Archaic wind instruments:
whirlies (harmonic pipes whirlies), ney (Persian, turkish and Arabic oblique flute), roumanian caval (guttural flute with back insufflator), sami selijefløyte (natural harmonics flute), Indian bansuri (bamboo flute), the armenian duduk (oboe popular ) indian morcheng (brass jews harp), australian didgeridoo (harmonic horn and voice modifier), sardinian launeddas, egyptian arghoul (popular polycalamus clarinets), maui xaphoon (bamboo clarinet), Hu Lu Si (chinese globular flute), bummulu, flute-keys with head modified;

– Electronic and virtual instruments:
Laptop with some software of sound processing and computating

The performance is accompanied by video images and processed in real time by Cynthia Garofalo, which he directed visual also using a system of video cameras mounted next to the musician to bring out the details. The images and video, interacting with the sounds, exalting and helping to build evocative atmospheres, are taken from reports made with Mario Crispi in the Middle East and Asia Minor.