Giuseppe Cordaro - 45°12′N 72°54′E (2018)

Arising out of a womb-like, silent void comes Giuseppe Cordaro’s 45°12’N 72°54’E, blinking into life and exploring the cyclical lineage of a new birth, a recent ending, and the never-ending flow of life’s river. Water both sustains life and erodes it. Like the crumbling and disfigured coastlines, she either laps against the throat or chokes it, providing nourishment or eating away at the body, either satiating a deep thirst and keeping organisms alive or discovering a grisly penchant for murder in death by way of drowning. Barriers barely hold back Cordaro’s roiling waves of modular synth, a thrusting, unstoppable power rolling around in the pit of the music, capable of collapsing sounds, but also capable of reshaping their architecture.

Cordaro’s wife was pregnant at the time of recording, and over seven long months Cordaro used a variety of differing techniques, including the use of a fetal echodoppler and a contact microphone to hear fetal sounds and noises as well as an arduino card, which encodes the electricity of the skin and produces musical notes. He then included this in the record – every synth and piano note rings with it.

As such, 45°12’N 72°54’E is highly intimate music, bringing the listener face-to-face with the glass-like fragility of life. And birth itself isn’t without its horrors: new life is a precious miracle, but the process itself is brutal agony; blood-coated skin can be imagined in the intense ‘Zeno A’, in the staccato pounding of the heartbeat and the heaving, distorted-wires of synth. Something is being cut open, and respite only arrives at the end.

Cordaro’s pulse-bright music is strong, majestic, a sound capable of standing up on its own two legs. Lives erode, and the passage of time waits for no one. Currents never stop. The old fades away, the new takes its mantle, and the unborn wait for the throne.