kvsu is not a label
kvsu is a space for musical and visual experimentation and research. A container, a frame, a mental space. kvsu facilitates performances and publishes materials.
kvsu is home to the artistic output of ubumaic (Michele Cagol), Kurodama (Hannes Pasqualini) and akirasrebirth (Roland Lioni) and their various collaborative projects. It's also an archive for the now discontinued homonymous duo project.
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akirasrebirth deals with video synthesis and glitch art in a live-performance context. His work focuses mainly on the relationship between mankind, machines and technology. Practices from circuit bending and hacking are fused with the aesthetic of glitch art, technology is being made imperfect, chaotic and hence more human.
Felt Kaan combines modular synthesis, baroque counterpoint with field recordings and concrete sounds to create slow and athmosperic compositions. They perform live as a duo, sometimes together with video artist akirasrebirth.
Kurodama (Hannes Pasqualini) works with sampling and obsessive looping, feeding from field recordings, everyday objects, modular synths and circuit-bent devices. His sound is grainy and organic, with a clear focus on texture and a dark and unsettling undertone.
Originally kvsu was a duo. Formed by Hannes and Michele in 2012. Since 2020 it morphed into its current configuration.
During the 8 years of the duo's activity, Michele and Hannes had explored the wide field between experimental electronics, noise, baroque counterpoint, idm and somehow even pop music. despite this, one element has always been at the centre of their work: destructive synthesis, which led them to make what they called “degraded drum&drone”.
ubumaic is the moniker of Michele Cagol, a researcher in education and composer from Bolzano (Italy). His main research themes are emotional education, visual/musical storytelling, communication and media education. As a composer he writes both for traditional, acoustic instruments and electronics. He has performed live in Bolzano, Bologna, Milano, Innsbruck, Munich, Dresden.
Digital and C30 Cassette.
To be Released December 4, 2020
Intimate Spaces is a musical exploration of non-inhabitable architectural spaces and their sounds, performed and produced using a mixture of field recording, sampling and synthesis.
It is an album about the dark, cold and claustrophobic interior of a concrete bridge, the sounds from the street heard through a 5-storey cavaedium and the dripping noise of a pool leaking into the service room below it.
The sounds of the outside become the sounds of the inside, but not before having been radically changed and shaped into something new.
Ultimately, this is an album about inhabiting the sound of uninhabitable spaces.
CD and compact disc. Released February 20, 2020
Ironaugust is a remix project based on the 2015 album The Malosco Sessions. a group of artists was asked to create new versions of our music using only the vinyl record as a sound source.
Cover design by Papernoise
Felt Kaan’s Paradiso is a composition for synthesizer and field recording inspired by Hieronymus Bosch’s triptych the garden of earthly delights, to be more specific, by the leftmost panel depicting Adam and Eve in the garden of eden.
The piece combines imitative counterpoint performed on a modular synthesizer with unprocessed and live-processed field recordings, focusing on the strong expansion of time and exploring the richness of what happens between notes. Felt Kaan is more interested in rendering a state of mind than crafting a sonic representation of Bosch’s painting.
12″ vinyl and digital. Released March 8, 2015
The 5 tracks on The Malosco Sessions have been performed live and subsequently recorded in the last 2 years. it’s a bit of a document of what we’ve been doing since we started kvsu.
The main setup used to perform these tracks is a collection of circuit-bent toys and keyboards, assorted desktop synthesizers, a drum machine, modular synth, sherman filterbank and various diy noisemakers.
Cover design by Papernoise, artwork by Papernoise and akirasrebirth.
A performance of a string quartet without musicians – the instruments play by themselves, responding to vibrations generated by means of synthesizers and little speakers. What might sound impossible was developed and realized by the collective ksvu from Bolzano. Periodic oscillations, impulses and sounds form the musical basis of the concert; together with projection mapping by akirasrebith.
Created for Transart Festival 2016
A collaboration with finland-based artist Pentti Dassum. Pentti remixed the track "Unsinnig" from The Malosco Sessions, removing all rhythmic elements and extending it into a wonderful, yet chilly, sea of reverberating ambient sounds.
This track, together with another remix by Pentti, was released by the Finnish label Kaukana Väijyy Ambient.
SEN|XOR a personal experience. In SEN|XOR your vital functions and your conscious and unconscious movements generate sounds and pictures.
You control kvsu~akirasrebirth’s instruments with your body, your feelings and your perception.
You are the audience, the interpreter, the composer and the instrument. Analogue and unpredictable.
SEN|XOR is an audio/video performance originally created in 2014 for the festival Transart. The electronic music duo kvsu and video artist akirasrebirth turned a small truck into an electronic music instrument, with which they toured South Tyrol playing 5-minute performances in which the spectator became part of the instrument itself.
Created for Transart Festival 2015
Years ago, Michele and Hannes were part of a hacking and circuit-bending collective called Secret Media Lab.
They wanted to create a simple tool for people who do circuit bending and hardware hacking and decided to develop a small and simple 555-timer-based oscillator which you could use as part of a bent instrument.
They later found that it worked great as a standalone audio oscillator as well and started to build whole oscillator banks out of it. They’ve used this circuit in several tracks, the most representative being "Threnody", the introductory track of kvsu's (the duo) first album The Malosco Sessions.
More info about the circuit can be found here.
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Audio waveform code by Zack Scholl