Two Cities by Jeff Gburek & Ilaria Boffa (Produced by Jeff Gburek)

"Two Cities" is an album of spoken-word, site-specific field recordings, & acousmatic sound, embracing themes of ecology, personal position, isolation, community and the liquidity of modernity, in all it's elusive forms. The reflection of two artists in two cities funneled into one place here now.
Ilaria Boffa lives in Padova, Italia and Jeff Gburek in Poznan, Polska. They contemplate together and apart the waters rising and receding in the wake of civilizations that mark the tide levels of the planet.

"The Shrinking Pond"

Begun in 2016, when the desiccation of the region had just about peaked and all local bodies of water seemed still to shrink from contact with the outside, the recordings from early Spring, the crisis of a dry Spring. The environment was documented on 3 different levels and these sound layers are revealed in the animated and multi-dimensional audio-texture: one strata is the literal binaural ambience, the noises of machines and animals heard within human range; the next, hydrophones in the river and pond, and then recordings of magnetic resonance fields (caused by electric cables, street lights, automobiles, cell-phones -- all using a disembodied guitar pick-up to capture sounds that are not normally within the human auditory spectrum. These sounds were then re-composed into a series of free audio spirals. After having heard Ilaria Boffa's work, "The Two Cities", I decided to add another spoken word intervention of my own, recorded this November, contemplating the atmosphere of ecological indeterminacy and human fragility. Together with the following piece "Aqua Alta, the tables are turned, nature is swelling at the seams.We stretch the cable of trans-communication, make ghost-bridges between two cities far flung and yet conjoined by a common liquidity. Special thanks to Marco Lucchi whose serendipitous emergence allowed a fragment of his "November Song" to enter the composition's rendering, never to be removed, with great pleasure, of another sound in another dimension, still inextricable from our own.

"Acqua Alta"

Embedded in this track is the voice of Ilaria Boffa speaking on two occasions. The first are phrases commemorating the language of Zygmunt Bauman (the sociologist, born in Poznan) and the concept of Liquid Modernity while the second moment takes us on her journey to Venice amidst the floods in November where she recites a spoken poem called "The Two Cities" (text below) which, in her own words, "deals with a profound sense of absence and distance, the acceptance of a painful looming scenario that echoes from a remote past. Sinking, drowning becomes simultaneously a very private and universal condition, a reflection on the global eco-dynamics currently shared by living and non-living beings."

The compositions feature texts and field recordings made by Ilaria Boffa in Venice recomposed, reconfigured and supplemented by Jeff Gburek in the studio and around Poznan, featuring slide guitar, piano, field recordings, radio captures, incidental voices (birds even). Thanks to Kołorking Muzyczny for piano and "the space to think" and Karolina Ossowska (backing vocals/voices on "Acqua Alta" and for inspiration in general).

"The railroad breaks the lagoon and
delivers life every thirty minutes.
Rarely on time.
It was November, that mystic entrance
at the arrivals. Wakes, the hiss, babel
a few interesting exhibitions.

'Nebbia nelle calli'.

Further west, the metropolis
its futurity self-restrained, no design for
earth subsidence.
How distant the strangers strangers *
how brittle their tilting in the cold.
Desolate the two cities.

'Acqua Alta!' they yell, 'acqua alta!'
all through.

And it floods slowly, it covers
each tongue, it salts all apertures
the wounds. Do you feel
the shockwave? Rarefied, penetrating
and reverberating underground.
Stay still. It recedes now.

Quiet the two cities."

-- Ilaria Boffa

Guitarist, composer, sound designer, field recordist, shortwave radio poet, blending electro-acoustic, electronica, spectral comp., cracked circuits, sounding organic objects with an ear towards earth voices. Studied Javanese and Balinese gamelan and theories of Partch and Xenakis. Working with dance/theater/butoh co. Djalma Primordial Science. More than 400 concerts throughout Europe since 2005.

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