Manuel Carbone: Acherusia

Manuel Carbone’s new album Acherusia is built from walks across the Phlegraean Fields, the sprawling volcanic caldera west of Naples. The area counts twenty-four craters and vents, many submerged; ground movement and gas emissions keep it under constant scientific watch. For Carbone, who grew up there, it is not an alien geology but a familiar, unstable terrain where myth and routine overlap.

Over several days, he gathered sounds that shift gradually from birds and wind to water, weather, and finally the murmur of urban life—distant voices, traffic, footsteps. The recordings retain a strong sense of physical presence, with footsteps and breath anchoring the listener in a specific body moving through space. Beneath them, restrained drones and sparse electronic tones suggest the subterranean forces at work, sometimes evoking the hiss of fumaroles without ever turning into a special effect.

The album never leans on the dramatic potential of its location. Carbone recorded during a period of heightened seismic activity but avoids framing the work as a disaster story. There is no romanticism about nature, and no detachment either. The result is neither a travelogue nor a warning, but a patient sequence of interconnected vignettes that put human endurance and everyday life on equal footing with geological time.