For the last hundred years, the line dividing music from visual art has grown increasingly obscure. Music has provided inspiration for countless artists, while art has offered the conceptual terms for music to break its own rules. Particularly within the contexts of Punk, and Experimental Music, art schools have fed the ranks – gifting countless rebellious and visionary minds. These are open worlds, between which positions and ideas freely meet and speak. Within it all, there lies an often unmentioned realm, far less easily defined, skirting beyond tangible grasp – sound and music made by visual artists, which might not be music at all. Joining Die Schachtel already singular catalog of ambitious sonic adventures from Italy, this is the strange, incongruous territory of Untitled Noise, Michele Lombardelli and Luca Scarabelli’s debut release.

Michele Lombardelli and Luca Scarabelli are two respected visual artists who have been active in the Italian contemporary art scene for many years. While joint their project, Untitled Noise, is positioned outside of sonic manifestations of visual, artistic, conceptual terms, it can not be entirely dislocated from this spectrum of thought. While it is not art in the visual sense, it equally makes no claims toward music, something which only the intellectual frameworks of the art-world tend to allow.

Untitled Noise is a gathering a phenomena – challenges, organizations, and interventions through sound – an occupancy of those territories which exist just beyond our ability to define. Evolving over four sides of this double LP – each dedicated to a single work, one sliding seamlessly into the next, the album is an aggressive, textural gesture in noise. Built from electronic sources and tradition instrumentation, shifting between pure abstraction, sublime drone, rhythmic pulse and broken flirtations with jazz, it rises as a melting pilar in sound. Drawn from recordings in both studio and live contexts, Untitled Noise marks the return of the Die Schachtel’s sub-imprint Zeit, dedicated to ambitious contemporary gestures in sound. Where music meets the realms of art, and what is known falls away. A joining of worlds, which not to be missed.