"Endings"

Guglielmo Bottin (b. 1977)

After completing studies in psychology at the University of Padua, he pursued a career as a musician and DJ in Italy and internationally. He has produced over 50 discographic releases for European and U.S. labels. In 2017 he presented a live electronics performance at the International Festival of Contemporary Music of the Venice Biennale. In 2019, he contributed to the creation of the Biennale’s Centro Informatico Musicale e Multimediale, organizing and coordinating popular electronic music workshops for the following three years. While pursuing a doctorate in musicology at the University of Milan, he was a visiting scholar at the Institut für Musikwissenschaft und Medienwissenschaft of Humboldt University, Berlin, where he conducted theoretical, historical, and anthropological research on technological approaches to groove and mechanical rhythm. Bottin has also contributed to contemporary art projects, organizing the sound design of Antoni Muntadas’ exhibition at the Spanish Pavilion for the 51st Venice Art Biennale and collaborating extensively with performance artist Chiara Fumai.

www.bottin.it

Endings (2024) is a collaboration between Marina Apollonio and composer Guglielmo Bottin that merges image and sound. Inspired by Fusione circolare (2016), the composition’s musical score emerges from the end groove, or the closed circle, the infinite spiral that the turntable stylus enters when the record ends. “The only sound you normally hear in the end groove is the crackling of the stylus or the barely audible ending of the last track on the other side of the record,” comments Bottin. “Sixteen sound rings of identical duration—1.33 seconds, the time of a complete revolution of the record—were recorded from the same number of disks. Without the addition of other sounds, these fragments of ‘media noise’ were elaborated and subsequently composed as tesserae of a polyrhythmic mosaic, a layered arrangement of accumulations, subtractions, and sudden interruptions typical of techno music.”

Visual and sound perception gain materiality: reproduced on the record activated by the record player, Fusione circolare synchronizes with the music, with the rhythm of its programmed cadence repeated in every revolution, sealed by the stylus meeting the radius of the spiral. In the end groove, the music gives way to silence. A moment of suspension ensues, a sort of limbo which is also a promise, the wait for a new beginning. Endings, the sound-image of the spiral, with its potentially infinite revolutions, encourages reflections on the form itself of the work of art. It is finite, but at the same time “open,” to quote Umberto Eco in his examination of Programmed and Kinetic art, regarded as constellations of possibilities, variations, and everchanging interpretations.