2016 – Neunau

“The Earth was incessantly covered in ice, it’s landscape an immense, frozen desert. Boulders and sand washed to the valley, crushed under the glaciers’ enormous weight, leaving nothing but the hardest rock behind.”

Neunau draws inspiration from natural phenomena, sculpting his indelible and furious expression into materials: a ritual guided only by the rhythm of his own heartbeat.

Composed exclusively of sounds recorded at the ancient forge museum in Bienno, in the middle of one of the largest valleys in the central Alps, Neunau presents an experience that goes beyond simple listening. His tools — water, iron and microphones — are used to transport the listener through time and place. A true voyage through forgotten ritualism and symbolism, these extracts aim to grind contemporary dance music to its barest essentials, making long-lost times ours again.

Neunau is the debut EP from Sergio Maggioni’s Neunau, released by Parachute on 12” vinyl and digital formats on May 27th, 2016.

released May 27, 2016

2016 – Passi

contemporary locus 10 reopens the abandoned powerhouse Daste e Spalenga with the site-specific project “Passi” by the artist Alfredo Pirri. Using the structural materials (concrete, iron and wood) of the station itself, Neunau performs a live manipulation of the sounds created by this industrial cathedral.The project by Neunau and Alfredo Pirri finds the collaboration started between contemporary locus and Invisible°Show.The music produced for the performance represents a new chapter in Neunau’s production brand new six tracks are available in digital download on Neunau’s bandcamp.
watch the performance:
youtu.be/SE4M5ZJDIpw

2017 – nel cemento

Phonodocumentary produced by Sergio Maggioni and Pier Enrico Villa. Report of a journey to the marl quarry of Parzanica (it) and the Pantano dam, in Temù (it), between june and july 2017, in search of the sounds of cement manifacturing and of the locations of its application. The microphone investigation was performed with the aim to catch their sounds and audio landscapes, in order to produce the track “Concrete”, on behalf of Paris 84 for Comme des Garcons. This journey is the subject of a documentary produced by Vice France.

2018 – Quadraphonic Transmission – Live in S.Vittore and the Forty Martyrs

Quadraphonic Transmission took place in the Milanese desecrated church of S.Vittore and the Forty Martyrs on October 2018.

A choral performance that translates in-depth research to a live improvisation of the recordings compiled with the monks of the sacred monastery of Chiaravalle. Neunau aims to support the monks’ heritage in a strikingly congruent and chilling recreation of the environment in which the sessions took place – emotionally and sonically evocative of the monastery’s prominent history.

2019 – Il ciclo del vuoto

In 2017, under a commission by Comme des Garçons, NEUNAU produced the music track “Concrete”, working along with Vice France also on the creation of the video documentary “Sound of Concrete”, that
follows the journey of the cement, from the explosions in the quarry of Tavernola to the working places inside the Pantano dam.

Following the work made for the “Concrete” documentary, Neunau has worked on all the recorded sound sources took in his beloved mountains and assembled a new thematic album based on the life of Concrete.
The harsher aspects of the sound quality of the element are collected and treated to create a quite menacing bit of music. Once again with his hands deep in the very inner substance of the chosen sound source, Neunau is able to convey its essence through sound.

The project is completed with a study in old-fashion typography: with the help of maestro Marino Andreoli, Neunau went to hand-print on a mobile character letterpress from 1880, which is part of the typography museum Lodovico Pavoni of Artogne in Valcamonica. As a result, every LP jacket is a unique piece of art, with different shades of ink and slightly different positions of the shapes involved.

2020 – SHELTER UNDER A ROCK BEFORE THE VAIA STORM

On August 28th 2018, Italo Bigioli and Neunau set up a recording session using a selection of recall horns. The chosen location is the valley of Saviore named “Località Brata”. Inside the dense forest that characterises it they found a suggestive shelter under a boulder where the recording took place.

On October 26th 2018 that same spot was destroyed by the “VAIA storm”, eradicating all the trees in its passage, fatefully changing the landscape.

All the founds raised buying this track will go entirely in charity, trying to give support in all the activities carried out by “ Gli Amici della Natura Val Saviore “

“ the sound of the Ibex Horn is precious and playing it is a strong and precise signal that goes straight into our limbic system, to the archaic part of the human brain. The area that governs all the spontaneous and automatics reactions, taking us straight back to the origin of our species. “

Italo Biglioli

2020 – organi di fondo

2020 – Il lago sospeso

2021 – Rimodulazione di flauti Paetzold durante una sessione di libera improvvisazione di Antonino Politano

Sergio Maggioni known by the alias of Neunau returns to Until Riots with another mind bending collection of live recordings.

Performed by Antonino Politano as a free improv session held at the San Lorenzo church in Val Camonica in 2019, this record sees the custom contrabass recorder as its sole protagonist.

Later reworked and produced in 2021, Neunau carries on his signature approach in a mesmerising accession cementing controlled chaos to glorious, ghostly melodics in a style very much reminiscent of his 2019 ‘Quadraphonic Transmission – Live in S​.​Vittore and the Forty Martyrs’ performance.