Edmondo Annoni Builds Interbeings From Residency Recordings

Edmondo Annoni’s Interbeings, released on Shimmering Moods, is assembled rather than composed. Its raw material was gathered in the rooms of a residency, including the people and animals present in them, and at Ferme du Parc Maximilien in Brussels. Part of it was captured during an exhibition opening, the rest in sessions that followed. The album carries that circumstance with it: what you hear is a place, recorded while it was being used.

Two elements anchor the process. Contact microphones placed on artworks convert surface vibration into signal, and the flugelhorn serves as a fixed point of breath and presence among the electronics. Annoni does not rank his sources. Environmental sound, voices, instrument and processing are placed on the same level and allowed to affect one another, which keeps the record closer to improvisation than to a finished design.

The result is hybrid material in which organic and artificial, bodily and synthetic, coexist without being resolved into one or the other. Track lengths vary accordingly: “Primordial Ordito Under a Cerulean Sky” runs under four minutes, while “The Reptile Dream Passage” takes eight, leaving room for drones, hand percussion, water and bird calls to accumulate without arriving at a conclusion.

That refusal to settle is the album’s actual argument. Interbeings treats coexistence as a working method rather than a subject, and leaves the listener inside the exchange.