Matteo Nasini Soundtracks the Stars

Sound demarcates boundaries and delineates spaces of intimacy and participation. It serves as a vehicle for the expression of disparate feelings: affection, pain, joy, restlessness. It unfolds emotions and faded memories. Sound defines volumes and creates vibrations. It resonates in liquids and on surfaces, reverberating through the air and within human bodies.

The substance and behaviour of sound is the focus of Matteo Nasini’s recent solo exhibition, ‘A Distant Chime’, at Clima in Milan. For this project, his fourth solo presentation at the gallery, the Rome-based artist and composer has created an installation comprising three arched metal forms on which sit clusters of mechanically activated percussion instruments that generate musical notes in response to electrical impulses. Spanning the first room of the gallery, these elements are connected to a cube-shaped control unit in the second space via plastic tubes and cables, which coil snake-like along the wooden floor. When I spoke to Nasini about the work at the opening, he described this box as the ‘brain’ of the whole system: it contains a computer with audio software capable of recalling the Gaia catalogue – an archive of the position, brightness, distance and proper motions for more than a billion stars.

The result of a long-term collaboration with a physicist, a computer developer and an architect, Nasini’s installation depends on a series of sophisticated calculations and algorithms. When a star in the Milky Way passes through the sky above the gallery, the computer identifies it, detects information about its distance and intensity, and communicates this data to the audio software, which generates a series of numbers corresponding to musical notes. These notes then reverberate within a harmonic system, randomly activating the percussion instruments. The outcome is an ephemeral, aleatory sequence of music that corresponds to the harmonies generated by the celestial bodies orbiting above us.

‘A Distant Chime’ is part of the artist’s ‘Welcome Wanderer’ project, previous iterations of which have included a performance at Ocean Space TBA21, Venice, in 2022, and a solo exhibition at Clima in 2021. Also consisting of an installation capable of translating the stellar movement of the Milky Way into an automatic musical composition, ‘Welcome Wanderer’ was expressed through various timbres of human voice as a polyphonic chant. In ‘A Distant Chime’, however, the human element has been entirely eliminated through the use of automated, mechanical devices. In theory, the artwork could perform the score – which would last approximately 220 million years, based on one revolution of the Milky Way – in perpetuity.

In Harmonices Mundi (Harmony of the World, 1619), the German astronomer Johannes Kepler attempted to find common rules between music and the movements of the solar system, following a theory that originated in Ancient Greece and was pursued by Pythagoreanism. Kepler observed in the book that he wished ‘to erect the magnificent edifice of the harmonic system of the musical scale … as God, the Creator Himself, has expressed it in harmonizing the heavenly motions.’ Grappling with a phenomenon that is almost beyond human comprehension, ‘A Distant Chime’ succeeds in revealing the emotional texture of a score which – despite its remote celestial origins – speaks to the universality of existence. On the day I visited, the stellar transit above the gallery was calm. Who knows how it will be tomorrow?

Matteo Nasini’s ‘A Distant Chime’ is on view at Clima, Milan, until 4 March

_{Main image: Matteo Nasini, A Distant Chime (detail), 2023, iron, steel, PVC, wood, PLC, two Glockenspiels, two tuning bells, triangle, cymbals, dimensions variable. Courtesy: the artist and Clima, Milan. Photo: Marco Davolio}