In Cosmo by Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio

Back in July 2020, at the end of the first lockdown, Venice-based Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio found himself in the deconsecrated Church of Saints Cosma and Damiano on the island of Giudecca in Venice. He started experimenting with the different acoustic scenes and spatial characteristics of the sixteenth-century apse, most notably its long and uniquely textured reverberations. Soon afterwards, a variety of local musicians were invited to join him and a shared isolation created an epiphanic community. The former Church became a communal music studio and those recording sessions in the apse turned into Ema’ s debut album "In Cosmo".

An exquisite sense for rhythm and space, coming from his passion for experimental electronica and love for collaboration, his references to different vocal traditions (from Dhrupad music to throat-singing), culminate in an ethereal and timeless resonance to this work.
Reverberating classical instruments, mostly Gabriele Tai's cello, intertwine with his vocals, emerging at different moments as an intimate punctuation, made up of transpositions, whispers, winds of voice that condense, mix and chase for the entire duration of the album. In this combination, the deep vulnerability in the work is expressed, calm yet defiant.

Wiltsch Barberio’s explorative combination of modern and perennial is further reflected in his practice of re-amplifying looped signals back into the space, which allows peculiar and evocative real-time interactions between digital and analogue. All the sessions, recorded with a site-specific mic setup that accentuates the slow layering and synthetic manipulation of sounds in real-time, were finely mixed by Louis McGuire and mastered by Taylor Deupree. The whole project became a preparation for listening, slow reciprocal listening as a pure musical act in motion in the world of flux.

Emanuele Wiltsch Barberio is a Venice-based musician and experimental vocalist who has composed and produced music for theatre, visual arts and cinema for over 15 years. His debut album, In Cosmo, to be released in october 2022, is a work of sonic visitations, encounters and reverberations that archives its own hive with subtly sustained attention to the layered ‘sound of silence’ today.