Electronic music, installations and audiovisual works

The electronic list opens with a piece for computer in 1991 and a handful of studio productions in the 1990s. From 2002 the instrument becomes the no-input mixer, from 2008 an analog synthesizer with laser, and from about 2011 live video, projection and light. Ciciliani played most of these works himself, so the performer page covers some of the same ground from the stage side.

Rota (1997) and home (2003) are sound installations. Planetary Runway (2009) is an audiovisual installation for eight speakers and eight light diodes. The others were made in the studio.

No-input mixer: Mask and 81 matters

Mask (2002, 25 minutes) and 81 matters in elemental order (2007) are the two catalogued works for no-input mixer, a mixing desk played without any source, only with the feedback of its own circuits. 81 matters is a CD: 81 tracks between 4 and 90 seconds long, to be played in shuffle mode, so the elements of the composition come in a new order every time. Each track is a poetic translation of the molecular characteristics of one chemical element, adjusted for the untamed circuits of the desk. Evil Rabbit Records in Amsterdam released it in March 2008.

Corrosion

Corrosion (2009, 13 minutes) is for a semi-modular analog synthesizer and laser reflections. It grew out of Corrosive, which Ciciliani played in autumn 2008 on the no-input mixer with laser, in Novigrad, at IAMAS in Ogaki and at Super Deluxe in Tokyo, and in spring 2009 on a Cwejman synthesizer in Los Angeles. Under its final title it stayed in his programmes until the Opatija Tribina in November 2015.

Pop Wall Alphabet

Twenty-six pieces, each taking a well-known album as its material; Abba, Eminem, Kraftwerk, Pink Floyd and U2 are among the artists. All the tracks of an album are superimposed, and spectral freezes, made by randomising the sound data of each track, draw a noise-based distillation out of the whole. Timbre, gesture and dynamic range come forward, and so does memory: the ear starts to imagine things that are not actually there.

The complete cycle takes four and a half hours. Ciciliani first played it in full at the Experimental Intermedia Foundation in New York on 11 December 2011. He repeated it in Huddersfield on 5 October 2013, during the symposium Noise In And As Music, and twice in one week at the Sonic Anchor festival in Hong Kong in April 2018, by then with images and text video. Single letters of the alphabet, such as Pop Wall Alphabet – K or – P, appear in many of his solo programmes.

Between 2011 and 2015 the cycle grew into a transmedia work with 27 images and 26 algorithmically generated texts, published as a book with a data DVD. See the discography.

Intersection and 8'66"

Intersection (2013) is built on two video recordings of the same street crossing in Zürich, one made by day, the other at night. Fast alternation of the two sources and of their inverted colours follows algorithmic processes that also control the music. The sound is made of clusters of oscillations in different registers and a voice from police radio, played back with waveset granulation. On both levels the piece deals with surveillance, observation, obsessive control and paranoia. It was first performed at UC San Diego on 5 February 2013.

8'66" (or everything that is irrelevant) (2012), for video and six iPads, was written with Yannis Kyriakides. Slagwerkgroep Den Haag played it in The Hague, Amsterdam, Utrecht and Rotterdam in 2012 and 2013, and in Montevideo, Buenos Aires and La Plata in May 2017. A version for video and two tablets was part of the duo programmes of Barbara Lüneburg and Ciciliani from 2013.

Insection (2015), also for live electronics and live video, was first played at Elektro Gönner in Vienna on 1 March 2015. Points of Audition (2017) is a piece for fixed media from the solo concerts of 2017 in London, Milan and Seoul.