[andrea marutti, discography]
a.a.v.v.: muzick out of open windows

Track List:

1.  DRONÆMENT - Open Content  6:27

2.  AALFANG MIT PFERDEKOPF - Jnaropie  6:42

3.  DEEP - Wertstattmuzick  6:55

4.  FRZ / IMAGHO - Snapshot  8:01

5.  SÉBASTIEN ROUX - 3 Open Windows  4:25

6.  ALIO DIE - Breathing Out of an Open Window  5:25

7.  ANDREA MARUTTI - My Playground  7:37

8.  LOGOPLASM - South Wind  6:20

9.  THE INFANT CYCLE - Green Floyd  7:31

10.  FRAGMIST - Deep Ripple Music  7:36

A compilation of field-recordings mixed with music and vice versa.

"I want to say thanks to all contributors, you personally and thanks to Andrea Marutti for inspiration (I Am a Field Recordist)"*

*Marcus Obst, from the original liner notes.

"I fell to Earth exactly one year after Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the Moon and uttered those now famous words, "That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind". Sometimes I wish I was there, in front of some little black and white TV, but I haven't stepped yet onto the surface of this planet then... That's a good excuse, I guess. Does this mean something to anybody? I don't know...

Since I was a child I have always lived in the same room, same apartment... It's been a little bit more than 33 years now. My older brother used to live in the same room with me, I can remember perfectly how he fed me with Progressive Rock, especially Genesis. I loved them at the age of 7, I still love their older albums now. Some Things Never Change: Fra Lippo Lippi anyone?

The joint ownership where I live in Milan, Italy, includes two big buildings, one facing the other. There is a big cement yard between them. In the afternoon, when school was over, the yard was crowded with children playing. I was one of them. We were some kind of baby-gang, you know? Ten, twelve... I can't remember exactly how many we were. That used to be our playground. My playground.

When I was asked to take part in the "Music Out of Open Windows" CD compilation I hesitated... I wasn't feeling so well in July, it would be too long and too personal to explain why, so I didn't feel like creating any music or making anything else at all. Then August came and I was off work the whole month. I travelled Italy from North to South and back, I met some of my best friends and had a great time with them. I swam into the sea and walked into the forests. I ate Logoplasm's curry beef and singed some old Mina's tunes with the beloved Cosco family. Suddendly all the troubles were gone.

When I got back in Milan I felt a big energy and a new hope, they're still inside of me at the time of writing... On September the 6th, during the evening, I was standing in front of my computer getting rid of the hundreds spam messages I received in August and trying to reply to the too many unanswered incoming messages I accumulated in the previous weeks.

The window in my room was open and sounds coming from the yard reached my ears. No child was playing. It looks like there are not many children living in the condominium nowadays, at least not as many as we were. Anyway, I was clearly perceiving all those rattling cars in the distance, and the dishes being washed after dinner and the rolling shutters being opened and closed in the foreground.

I recorded directly to disk some 45 minutes of audio using Wavelab 3.0 and a cheap Sound Blaster microphone. I edited the original recording to obtain an eight minutes version and applied some long reverb on it using Sound Forge 5.0, then I went to sleep.

On Sunday the 7th I got up quite early and started working again on what was taking shape as my contribution to this compilation. I had some Wavestation patches that I wanted to use since a long time, so I rehearsed them along with the "playground" soundfile. I tried different bpms in Cubase VST32 and slighlty edited one of those Wavestation patches. I managed to get a 90 bpm midi-clock output from Cubase to the Wavestation so that I could benefit of its famous wavetables and recorded a track by hand. I imported the audio tracks in Nuendo 1.5 and improvised a rough mix. The Wavestation patch is being faded in the final mix starting at 0:45, you can clearly hear it around 1:30 until the end.

With the same method I subsequently added more and more parts played on my Roland JD-800 using only custom sounds that I programmed for a recent live performance. All the "atmospheric" sounds you can hear starting at 2:50 until the end of "My Playground" are from the JD-800 with one exception: a long "background" sample from a Twin Peaks episode. This is brought to your attention a couple of times around 3:40, and during the closing section. A bpm-driven Nuendo effect called "Tranceformer2" is also applied on one of the JD-800 parts to create the pulsating rhythm you can hear from 3:10 to 5:30. Late afternoon the final mix was completed, I had my dinner and got back to those f***ing spams.

The photograph I choose to accompany "My Playground" was taken on September the 20th around 10:00 p.m. using an Hewlett Packard 215 Photosmart digital camera and reworked a little bit using Photoshop 6.0.

I'd like to thank Marcus for his kind invitation and all my friends who helped me getting the blues off my shoulder.

"My Playground" was for Mari."

[Andrea Marutti, 27.09.2003]*

* Words taken from the Field Muzick website.