Stefano Pilia - Spiralis Aurea (2022)

Venturing into untapped realms of creative exploration, the Genoa born, Bologna based, guitarist and electroacoustic composer, Stefano Pilia, returns to Die Schachtel with a double LP of material that intertwines traces of sacred geometry, collective experience and elusive connections between nature and human kind. “Spiralis Aurea” encounters the composer venturing into unchartered waters, exploring notions of spirituality via a body of twelve compositions, recorded in various combinations with a cast of all-star instrumentalist; Alessandra Novaga, iosonouncane, Silvia Tarozzi, Mattia Cipolli, Ensemble Concordanze, Elisa Bognetti, Enrico Gabrielli, Valeria Sturba, Giuseppe Franchellucci, Adrian Utley, and Cecilia Stacchiotti.

The roots of “Spiralis Aurea” rest within Pilia’s longstanding, personal engagement with the spiritual and an epiphany had during a visit to the Futa Pass cemetery, the resting place for German soldiers killed in Italy during the Second World War. Deeply moved, he reflected on the profound meanings laying below geometry of its design; “a place"crossed" by thoughts about the landscape, history, symbols, rituals. A work offering a reflection on life and death. A prayer for the living and the dead.”

Drawing its title from the Golden Spiral - also known as the golden ratio, golden section, golden mean, or divine proportion - a mathematical formula and geometric form that has maintained both mystical and creative significance for millennia, each of the 12 works that comprise “Spiralis Aurea” began with a figure or process that is both geometric and symbolic, drawn by Pilia, that slowly translated into tangible organizations of sound.

Displaying a deep resonance with works by La Monte Young, Arvo Pärt, Pauline Oliveros, Eliane Radigue, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Terry Riley, that have witnessed trajectories of experimental music delving toward the spiritual, divine, and metaphysical, Pilia’s “Spiralis Aurea” culminates as a series of sonic meditations, leaving room within their spacious forms to encourage active listening. Calling up echoes of ancient musics within their optimistic, forward thinking tones, across various arrangements of instrumentation - double cello quartet and bass, horns quartet and bass organ, string quartet, string quartet and organ, cello quartet, solo organ, cello solo and synthesizer, electric guitar quartet, guitar quartet and synthesizer, piano and violin - Pilia sculpts a striking intersection between acoustic and electroacoustic process, drone, and chamber music, harnessing the literal and abstract in search of order and higher meaning within a chaotic and uncertain world.

Overwhelmingly beautiful, conceptually rich, and marked by a profound sense of emotive tension, Stefano Pilia’s “Spiralis Aurea” is issued as a pure gold double vinyl LP in a limited deluxe edition of 250 copies, housed in a beautiful sleeve designed by Bruno Stucchi-Dinamomilano, painstakingly letterpress printed with a 1915 German press machine with a hand-painted and applied gold foil shining on a rust-coloured materic paper of Franciscan inspiration.