no.5 - new release - October 2025
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In 2022, Italian composer Paolo Calabrese produced no.5, an acousmatic composition constructed from two phonographies: the sound of an air conditioner and a 1970s fan. Both are paradigmatic instances of the everyday auditory environment habitual and unremarked, yet materially insistent. Subjected to processes of multiplication, filtering, panning, and frequency shifting, these sources are displaced from their quotidian function and reconstituted within what Calabrese designates as a mode of “harmonised concretism.” Here, the recognisable sonic trace is neither effaced nor fetishised, but folded into a structure of sustained tonal planes, preserving the reflexive potential of the concrete while suspending in a stretched temporality.
The choice of materials reflects a convergence of two lines of inquiry. First, an exploration of the “ignorable” as a category of auditory experience; sounds that ordinarily recede into the background, yet, when bought to the foreground, reveal a porous boundary between environment and composition. Second, an engagement with Jean Baudrillard’s theorisation of the antique object: “The antique object no longer has any practical application, its role being merely to signify… its very specific function within the system, namely the signifying of time.” In no.5, this problematic is staged as an encounter between the obsolete and the operative, between technological debris emptied of utility and its contemporary counterpart that continues to function.
The work articulates an aesthetic of space-making rather than saturation. Through its refusal of perpetual variation and its resistance to affective immediacy, no.5 enacts a mode of estrangement that interrupts habitual listening. Against the consolatory logic of the “emotionally moving” artwork, which risks serving as a vehicle of escape, Calabrese situates perception itself as the site of critique. Estrangement becomes not an alienation from presence but a condition through which presence may be reconstituted and valued.
Composed by Paolo Calabrese.
The composition took part in Obsolete Sound project by Cities and Memories, 2022.
Braun’s Type HL-70 recording courtesy of Conserve The Sound.
Text by Jacob Calland.
Mastered by Jacob Calland.