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Commissioned by Radio France in 2012 for the Alla Breve series, Lorem Ipsum is a work inspired by the themes of post-modern literature; a sort of adventure through a labyrinth built upon an anthology of "impossible" texts: the standard version of Lorem Ipsum (the placeholder text used in printing and typesetting), Luigi Serafini’s Codex Seraphinianus, and Machaut’s Ma fin est mon commencement.
It is the fundamental weakness of these texts—namely, the fact that they mean (almost) nothing—that became the pivot around which I chose to build an improbable Library of Babel. In this process, it is not so much a matter of singing for the sake of singing, but of acknowledging that the meaning of a text is transformed (to put it politely: in reality, the comprehension of a sung text is eroded and undermined by the musical structure) every time it is set to music. The result is a haunted house in which appearances no longer correspond to reality, but also an observatory from which one can catch a few reflections of our world.
Recording: Tommaso Gorli