James Ginzburg & Riccardo La Foresta - Six and Forty-Six (2024)

Initially conceived in 2022 and installed at Palazzo Re Enzo in Bologna, Six and Forty-Six is a collaboration between percussionist and sound artist Riccardo La Foresta and James Ginzburg.

The two pieces capture the interactions between La Foresta’s Drummophone — an array of bass drums sounded by compressed air which produce complex acoustic drones — and a custom string instrument designed by Ginzburg — a bass monochord and zither hybrid — that is activated by a set of computer-controlled solenoids and amplified. As the strings are struck the subsequent air pressure in the room subtly shifts the tuning of the bass drums, creating ever-evolving emergent structures within the drone which in turn create sympathetic vibrations in the string instrument’s strings. These spatial sonic relationships create a generative system that chases impossible unisons through countless microtonal movements and repetitive pulses.

Six and Forty-Six explores and conjures cognitive hierarchies in frequencies, time and perception. Neither of the two artists were in the room during the recording session — rather, they were listeners in a control room, dissolving the dichotomy between the listening-player and the playing-listener as they watched their instruments interacting with each other in an isolated room.

Riccardo La Foresta is a percussionist and sound artist based in Modena, whose work questions the role of the drum as a percussive instrument. Over the past eight years he developed a system called Drummophone, through which he creates resonances and vibrations treating the drum as an aerophone and creating acoustic drones, ancestral melodies and complex beats that drastically distance the instrument from traditional drumming. La Foresta's research blurs the lines between percussion music, sound art, improvisation, and drone music, revealing the acousmatic response of the architecture.

James Ginzburg is a British American musician and artist based in Berlin. He is one half of emptyset alongside Paul Purgas, and one quarter of Osmium with Hildur Guðnadóttir, Rully Shabara and Sam Slater.