We’ve all experienced those moments when we capture a perfect image in our minds eye; those indelible scenes we can recall with perfect clarity. These snapshots might last a lifetime or disappear as quickly as they were realized but in that split-second, for composer Pasquale Riviezzo, it’s a preservation of a very personal kind.
“I usually travel from Milan to Naples for my university studies. These are images of places that I saw in a misty morning while I was on the train, that were fixed in my heart for a moment, mixed with flowing feelings and thoughts. They maybe became different places after that, but this is a story I’d like to tell you, through notes. It’s how a common place becomes intimate, and then a strangely isolated place.”
Inspired by transit and transcendence, misty mornings and fleeting connection, Pasquale’s EP is a collection that’s characterized by weighty piano chords, ethereal atmospheres and measured use of string to give tracks a melancholic focus. It allows ‘An Isolated Railway’ to drift along measured string and gentle piano, ‘Cloud Gate’ to swell with the soft vision of rolling Cumulus and the heavens opening, and the maudlin melody of ‘The Inner Realm’ to breathe through the dead space and atmosphere.
‘An Isolated Railway is the abandoned station you see through the window while you’re travelling to another town,” Pasquale explains. “It’s an isolated place, vanishing in the mist, where few voices are heard and a train is passing by, and The Inner Realm is am indefinite sequence of places, a continuous flow of emotions that paints a landscape in the air.”
‘Cloud Gate’ is when the gate of clouds opens wide and the rain starts falling and I’ll listen to ‘The Wastelands’ with closed eyes and see sounds painting a landscape in the imaginary space. I called that place ‘The Wastelands’ because it feels like a distant landscape brought back for a just moment, then, just like a dream, at the end you open your eyes and there's no trace left. Just a subtle sensation of having been there, somewhere, sometime.”
“Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah ! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent.
Je me suis dit : laisse,
Et qu’on ne te voie :
Et sans la promesse
De plus hautes joies.
Que rien ne t’arrête,
Auguste retraite.
J’ai tant fait patience
Qu’à jamais j’oublie
[...]
Oisive jeunesse
A tout asservie,
Par délicatesse
J’ai perdu ma vie.
Ah ! Que le temps vienne
Où les coeurs s’éprennent.”
