Lazzarella by Minced Oath

Lazzarella is the second in a series of albums weaving volatile, textural surges with clockwork synth patterns. This music originated as an all-night ambient performance on Dublin Digital Radio, presented as Sun Static in 2020 and was supported by the Arts Council of Ireland. The work began with the conception of a performance system built around sixteen convolution resonators, each fed by dynamically controlled noise sources within the computer. The aim was to create an instrument capable of producing textural, aleatoric swells—free from temporal grids or fixed rhythmic structures—something I could surrender to and inhabit over an extended duration. The original performance lasted around eight hours.

If tuned correctly, the resonators could behave like an ensemble of jagged, crumbling bowed instruments. For the noise sources, I stripped some vintage movies of their dialogue and music, leaving only the residual cackling hiss of magnetic tape and incidental ambient sounds. Each track takes its title from its source movie—the movies being chosen only for their sonic character. Once amplified and routed through the resonator system, these fragments produced brittle, unpredictable timbres and unstable harmonic configurations—an environment that invited plenty of play.

There is a sense throughout of the microscopic blooming into the cyclonic: superfluous artefacts are brought to the foreground, their stochastic energy revealed and buoyed up. Each return to the material yielded subtle differences and unpredictable prods, as though the system itself was musically temperamental. Over time, the pieces have evolved through multiple iterations, incorporating modular synthesis and acoustic instrumentation to brace and embellish them. Sonar Kella forms the first part of a two-album series.

The paintings that form the artwork are by Bart O’Reilly, an old friend from art college in the 1990s who I feel very lucky to collaborate with. The level of uncertainty at the heart of this music led to the material being shelved for a couple of years with no idea how to finish or present it. These images popped up on his social media feed one day in summer 2025 and I knew exactly how to pull it all together. Bart now paints and writes in Baltimore, Maryland.

music: electronic and otherwise

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