Un'offerta musicale

A musical offering. While the winter wanders ever-forward towards Springtime, and the daily-growing sun begins to melt recent heavy snowfall, I find myself nesting in the studio. As part of February's RPM Challenge, I spent the month building a proverbial nest out of various sonic bits and pieces found on old hard-drives and dusty cassette tapes. In short: rooting through my personal archives for unfinished and unreleased work. And to say it was a trove would be a small understatement. Some of the recordings date back to 2013.

February was spent uncovering, organizing, editing, (re)recording parts, and mixing and mastering. Most had no album artwork, so it was valuable time creating visuals as well. Instead of releasing the nearly one dozen albums, EPs, or singles (just a handful) all at once on my Bandcamp page, I thought it would be nice to start a series of bi-monthly releases. This series is titled MezzoMese, which is Italian for 'half-a-month.' I'll release music on the first and fifteenth days of each month, and write a blog post here describing the creative process for each. MezzoMese, a pleasing and musical conjunction: the two emm's, the hissy/sibilant tz of the double-zeds (or zees) and the ess...a bit melodic and a bit percussive.

The first release in the MezzoMese series is a five-song EP titled rituali sonori (Italian for 'sound rituals'). It is the most recent of recordings, created in between 2025 and February 2026. Its overarching theme is the distillation of my experiences researching the ancient Samnites in Italy, unearthing their archaeological sites, artifacts, their language, all while (re)connecting with my ancestral homeland. The music 'takes place' in Samnium, modern day Molise. It is a conversation between the present and the deep past, between archaeology, experimental ethnomusicology, and music composition.

[Caption: Album artwork for rituali sonori. A superimposition of photographs I took; the amphitheater at Pietrabbondante shortly after a rainstorm mixed with a breathtaking, fiery, and primeval sunset over the Apennines in the mountain village of Collemacchia.]

The first piece is titled tefúrúm, which is Oscan for 'burnt offereing.' It is a piece of sound art (re)presenting the sound of a ritual burnt offering, perhaps one made at the temple at Pietrabbondante. The sounds were synthesized using modular synthesis and electronic processing. As I created these sounds, I imagined being at the altar some 2,300 years ago, with a microphone buried just underneath the place where offerings were set on fire as part of an ancient sacred ritual.

The second piece is titled oggetti/voci, 'objects/voices' in Italian. It is a remixing of two pieces I recorded live back in February 2025 at the Dawnland Gallery in Westerly, RI. The first piece was a 'sound ritual' I performed using snail shells, smooth limestone pebbles, and porcupine quills I had found while hiking the Molisan mountains above Collemacchia. These objects are abundant around the trails there, and to me symbolize my emotional and metaphysical connection to the land and inhabitants (past and present) there. The second piece is a vocal composition I sang in Oscan, using words written by a Samnite women over 2,000 years ago. Both are mixed and processed together, hence the title.

The third piece is titled húrtín, the Oscan word for 'sacred garden' or 'grove' (Latin hortus, Italian orto, and English horticulture). It is a word found within the first line of the Oscan Tablet (also known as the Agnone Tablet), a bronze tablet inscribed with ritualistic instructions on what to do upon entering and walking around a sacred forest amongst statues of the various Samnite deities. I recorded this piece on three instruments, each live and in a single take: modular synthesizer with a novel utilization of a sample-and-hold patch, Wurlitzer 200A electric piano, and electric bass (an American Fender Mustang bass). The only set 'instruction' or unifying 'rule' for this piece was the tempo; chance determined any harmonic, melodic, or rhythmic structure(s). Also, apropos to the piece and the artifact itself, the reverb plugin preset I used was called 'valley forest.'

The fourth piece is titled uccelli, Italian for 'birds.' I used modular synthesizers to compose this one. If there is one thing modular synthesis is good at, it's synthesizing bird sounds. This piece also includes a sparkly, echoey, floating melody played on the Wurlitzer electric piano.

The fifth and final piece on this EP is titled fíísnú, the Oscan word for 'temple' or 'shrine,' another sacred space. Similar in concept to the Greek τέμενος (témenos) meaning land 'cut off' from common use and set aside for sacred ritual (like a húrtín); and similar to Latin fanum. While creating this piece I imagined myself entering into such sacred space: what was the ancient ecosystem like? what would I hear? I thought back to my visits to Pietrabbondante, and remembered the birds' chirping echoing around the ruins, amongst the trees, and across the mountainside. The bird sounds in this piece were not synthesized, but made organically by me, using whistling, vocalizations, and other animalistic, guttural utterances. They were recorded, looped, and electronically manipulated to create an electroacoustic, bio-digital ecosystem...a future linked to the past, created in the present.

rituali sonori can be listened to and purchased here: https://antonioforte.bandcamp.com/album/rituali-sonori

Thank you for reading and for listening. Stay tuned for more.