A musical fable written, composed and performed by Francesco Cavaliere.

First emerging during the mid 2000s in the field of experimental electronics, the Italian born, Berlin based artist captivated us in 2021 with a brilliant duo record made with Tomoko Sauvage. With a handful of noteworthy releases having appeared since, he now returns with a remarkable fable bridging the territories of spoken word and electronic and electroacoustic composition.

For the better part of the last twenty years he has woven intimate tapestries of sound from a strikingly singular palette of processed source material that have resulted in startling abstractions. It is this departure point that underscores the record, a radically new way of working in his output. The tale unfolds in two acts — Il grillo ventriloquo incontra Setha la mantide, the ventriloquist cricket meets Setha the mantis, and Atta e Volma nel regno delle api di vetro Ossax, Atta and Volma in the Ossax realm of glass worker bees — encountering a range of insect characters in various guises: a cricket, a spider, and numerous mantises, ants and bees.

Against the fable's text, delivered with an ever-present sense of drama, the composer unfurls wild and playful, almost hallucinatory electroacoustic interventions, pulsing patterns on synths, fractured ambiences, and fleeting rhythms and melodies, bumbling to the surface like watery springs, before receding from view and returning again.

Strange and wonderful in the best possible of ways, infusing experimental music with the childlike wonder, playfulness and mystery that was often encountered within popular culture during the 1970s but rarely since, this is one of those rare creations that leaves you feeling more curious than when you began.