Gabriele Balzano - Entropia: Iteration I

Album: Gabriele Balzano - Music From Entropia (2024), self released on Bandcamp.
This album is the result of three live performance recordings, commissioned by the Società Varallese di Fotografia Analogica and the Museo Storico Etnografico della Bassa Valsesia, on the occasion of the photo exhibition “Entropia”, held in september 2024, at the marvelous Villa Caccia in Romagnano Sesia (Italy) the brainchild of the famous 19th-century architect Alessandro Antonelli. Entropy is a measure of the disorder of a physical system. Greater the entropy, greater the disorder. Entropy is closely related to the second principle of thermodynamics, which states that the total entropy of an isolated system tends to increase over time. In other words, the universe tends to become increasingly disordered. In an attempt to translate the concept of entropy into music, I was inspired by the Boltzmann equation, which provides a probabilistic interpretation of entropy, linking it to the variability of microstates: imagine a container with gases inside that can move to different positions and energy states; the number of microstates represents all the possible combinations of positions and energy states of the particles. The greater the number of microstates, the greater the disorder and thus the entropy of the system. In my performance, the system isolated from thermodynamic equilibrium is represented by a closed electroacoustic chain, which does not admit external sounds. The architecture of the system involves the use of two modular analog synthesizers for sound generation, interconnected to a network of mutually independent delay lines. The infinite number of possibilities afforded by this voltage control-based architecture is perfect for translating the concept of entropy into sound. Starting from an ordered arrangement, I will proceed throughout the performance to drive the electroacoustic chain within the sound combinations that will spontaneously emerge from the analog machines, in an expressive exchange between human and electric instrument. Each performance session will begin with the same set-up, but will always end differently.

[@Demention94]

A pleasant listen.

[@gabriele_balzano]

Thank you! 🙏

[@monsterofeastfelton]

This is really cool. I love the harsh texture of the sound design with the drones. Very dark and brooding.

[@gabriele_balzano]

Thank you very much. I'm glad you like it 🙏