luciano chessa & squncr - Ç

Ç (pronounced “cédilla”) is the name of a duo consisting of Italian-American audiovisual and performance artist Luciano Chessa and French multi-instrumentalist and sound explorer squncr (François Larini). It is also the title of their first, self-titled album, a scintillating collection of sound art, oddball orchestral movements and beautiful ouevres électroniques. Each track unfolds with eerie precision, opening wide meditative sceneries.

Ç was recorded in Monaco during Chessa's one-year artist residency there: For Chessa and Larini this was a period of intense sonic experimentation, spanning sound art, deep listening, and improvisation that led to this sprawling and cohesive release. Chessa mainly plays the Đàn Bầu, a traditional Vietnamese monochord stringed instrument, while Larini plays electronics, zither, piano and Hohner organetta.

Basking in the sunshine of Villefranche-sur-Mer, the Riviera town between Monaco and Nice, and inspired by the heritage of Robert Filliou and Georges Brecht’s mid-60s art and performance space La Cédille qui Sourit (“the smiling cedilla”) as well as the raucous unpretentiousness of the Trinquette Jazz club, Ç produced a tape of shadows and light—at once as dark and atmospheric as the Rue Obscure and as luminous and free as the Eyes in Cocteau's Chapelle Saint-Pierre.

Luciano Chessa is an audiovisual and performance artist working across opera, installation, painting and experimental music. His work has been presented internationally at SFMOMA, the Guggenheim, Performa Biennial, MONA (Tasmania) and MART (Rovereto, IT), and featured in Artforum, Frieze and Vogue Italia. As a scholar of Futurism, he authored Luigi Russolo Futurist and created the Orchestra of Futurist Noise Intoners, while more recently preparing Julius Eastman’s Symphony No. II, premiered at Lincoln Center and later performed by the New York Philharmonic and London Symphony Orchestra.
Lucianochessa.com

squncr sound practice is focused on ambient, drones, tapes, field recordings, improvisation and archives, balancing between personal narrative and ethnographic documents. His work has been presented – in the context of recordings, exhibitions, broadcasts and live performances – in the United Kingdom, Germany, France… He collaborated on several projects with visual artists, choreographers and curators. His latest project, The Moorish Shield, was released earlier this year by Bristol based label Fluid Audio/Facture.