An atmosphere is a space that is at once processual and indeterminate. Meteorologically speaking, it is a turbulent zone of gaseous matter surrounding the earth through which human and non-human lives move. In an affective sense, it is something formless yet palpable, an environmental immersion which moves through, between, nearby and within bodies while remaining suspended in air, ethereal.
This project seeks to bring together the meteorological and the affective through a series of free improvisations beginning from Joy Division’s song “Atmosphere”, in response to the micro-political climate that surrounds us. As Gilles Deleuze writes, affective atmospheres are singularities which enter into virtual conjunctions and at the same time constitute a complex entity - like points of melting, boiling, condensation, coagulation. “Atmospheres” is also an attempt to create a common territory where we can expand upon and reconfigure a set of motifs and refrains both musical and extra-musical by stretching them, slowing them down, molecularizing their sonic textures and inhabiting them in the manner of a desert, a mist, a glacier, moving between wave and particle.
This first improvisation was performed and recorded in Palermo by Graeme Thomson & Silvia Maglioni on electric guitar, synthesizer and laptop before being subjected to further processing.