ABSTRACT SPEED + SOUND

Abstract Speed + Sounda by Turin’s Daniele Mana aka Vaghe Stelle. Associated with Italian label Gang of Ducks and member of production group One Circle with fellow nationals Lorenzo Senni and A:RA, Daniele’s roots in the emerging Italian production scene run deep and place him at its center. His is a clear, utterly contemporary voice with a unique relation and keen ear to the relevant past.

Taking its title from painter Giacomo Balla’s iconic 1913-14 work, the EP draws a critical line between contemporary digital music practices and the century-old Italian Futurist movement. Where Futurism obsessed over the automobile and its unprecedented speed, Daniele fixates on the newer precedent set by digital networks, how they move our bodies and how our representations move through them. The cover art immediately speaks to this: a digital self-portrait of the artist stylized atemporally as a Nefertiti bust and/or The Man Who Fell to Earth.

Following themes of self-making and reimagining, Daniele draws from a canon of definitive Italian films for his palette of fluttering, disembodied vocal samples. Highly processed, not exactly dehumanized, they’re evocative, yet impossible to trace—towing deep into the uncanny valley. Their haphazard arrangement and asexual timbre react to temper any masculine swagger boasted in the rhythm of these tracks. Rocky drums splash and batter like objects in viscous space, while shards of vocality replete the distortion. Follow the slipping downbeat of “Hyper” or the tragic syncopation of “Multiple Concentric Hexagons”.