2010 11 13
Today we started the selection, from our vast archive of studio live recordings, for the making of a new digital EP on Mr Mutt… Coming in early 2011. (Cancelled)
2010 10 28
A review for Crónica's compilation Crónica L on Textura: “ Crónica celebrates its fiftieth release with a compilation featuring nine collaborations by Stephan Mathieu, Janek Schaefer, Lawrence English, Marc Behrens, Stephen Vitiello, Tu M', and others. Crónica L's material is emblematic of the type of bold experimentalism the label has remained faithful to since its inception more than seven years ago. It's an hour of challenging yet engrossing listening packed with microtextural soundscapes and granular drones that should appeal to devotees of Francisco López and electronic producers of kindred sensibility. Throughout the recording, ever-mutating sounds flutter hyperactively in convulsive settings of resolutely abstract character. In ‘Unfurling Fugue,’ Janek Schaefer weaves Enrico Coniglio's Venice-based field recordings into a combustible melange of clattering noises and organ tones. Gilles Aubry and Paulo Raposo give us nearly ten minutes of restlessly churning industrial dronescaping in ‘Forms of Suspension.’ @c (Pedro Tudela and Miguel Carvalhais) and Gintas K conjure a dizzying storm in ‘K./85’ of rabid insectoid chirp and rumble, with all of it laced with swirling shards of acoustic guitar flutter. Stephan Mathieu and Piotr Kurek generate a deeply crackling drone of voice fragments and electronic slivers (‘The Heavens Have Many Colors’), while the plaintive ululations of a Middle Eastern singer shadow a turbulent churn of industrial noise in Ran Slavin and Vitor Joaquim's ‘Voices Over Water.’ ‘Circles of Twine’ finds Lawrence English and Stephen Vitiello weaving outdoors field recordings and piano playing into a dense field of reverberant haze, after which ‘Rêve General,’ perhaps the album's peak moment, takes the recording out on a celestial cloud of blinding tones and washes, courtesy of The Beautiful Schizophonic (Jorge Mantas) and Tu M' (Rossano Polidoro, Emiliano Romanelli). Despite the involvement of eighteen different artists, the collection turns out to be surprisingly cohesive with each of the nine pieces complementing one another by spinning fully developed variations on the dronescaping style. On this collection, Crónica re-affirms its reputation as a label of integrity that regularly offers free-to-download recordings to its listeners and is more than a little deserving of whatever support the electronic music listening community can provide. ”
2010 10 10
We are working on a more Web Standards web sites for TU M' and our side projects: TU M'P3, Mr Mutt, MMO, Steno… Coming in early 2011.
2010 08 15
After almost 14 months, the TU M's CD Monochromes Vol. 1 is sold out at 12K Shop, it's again available at TU M' Shop, and in digital download version via Boomkat, iTunes, eMusic and other online shops.
2010 08 10
New review for Pink Shark on Boomkat.com: “ Released in 2004, Pink Shark was the first Phthalo release by Italian duo Emiliano Romanelli and Rossano Polidoro. A compelling, structurally erratic glitch album, Pink Shark still sounds adventurous and fresh in 2010 on this digital reissue. This is also a far more rhythmic and immediate album than the drone-based, abstract likes of last year's Monochromes Vol. 1, released via the Line label; the squeaks and pops of Your Secret DSP introduce the record with a convulsing slapstick quality, while Lesson No. 3 could almost pass for a house or techno record (albeit one made by Oval). Further interesting pieces crop up in the form of Ear Guard, Untitled 02 and Your Sky Is Green, all of which quite beautifully shatter audio into disorganised pieces from which obscure beat patterns arise. ”
2010 07 13
The CD compilation Crónica L, released by Crónica (Portugal), with Enrico Coniglio + Janek Schaefer, Gilles Aubry + Paulo Raposo, Marc Behrens + Cem Güney, @c + Gintas K, Pure + Durán Vázquez, Stephan Mathieu + Piotr Kurek, Ran Slavin + Vitor Joaquim, Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello, The Beautiful Schizophonic + Tu M', It is available, in limited quantity, at our Online Shop.
2010 07 01
The composition Rêve General of 2009, composed at six hands with Jorge Mantas (The Beautiful Schizophonic), it will be presented at Episode 11 of Futurónica, a broadcast in Rádio Zero airs tomorrow, July 2nd at 08h (GMT), as part of the RadiaLX 2010 festival.
2010 06 10
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on Sonomu.net: “ Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, operating as Italian multimedia duo Tu m', rounded off the first decade of the twenty-first century by kicking off an audio-visual project featuring chamber music [of] fragile atmospheric colours. Four of the first audio pieces have been gathered on the compact disc Monochromes Vol. 1, while glimpses of the video are archived here: http://www.tu-m.com/monochromes/ The great canvas of each monochrome consists of pale background which conveys the feeling of both distance and vastness, upon which layers of detail and texture are laid. What seems monolithic from a distance proves stippled and intricately detailed the closer you get. Though composed solely with decidedly unsensual laptops and mixing board, the effect is volumptuous rather than austere. Imagine wine spilled out onto a table cloth, which both absorbs it and spreads it along its weave, lending the liquid fiber. So does the music spread ever outward rather than horizontally or vertically. These are sounds that cut thorugh the noise in the radio environment, begging comparison with Eno's Music for Airports. Music this expansive and enormous might best be deemed Music for Earth. Though it neither ebbs nor flows, waxes or wanes, it breathes, and it seems to go on breathing long after the listener has departed. ” — Stephen Fruitman
2010 05 29
The composition Rêve General of 2009, composed at six hands with Jorge Mantas (The Beautiful Schizophonic), it will be available on Crónica L CD compilation, released by Crónica(Portugal) and distributed to all the subscribers of the Neural magazine # 36 – With Enrico Coniglio + Janek Schaefer, Gilles Aubry + Paulo Raposo, Marc Behrens + Cem Güney, @c + Gintas K, Pure + Durán Vázquez, Stephan Mathieu + Piotr Kurek, Ran Slavin + Vitor Joaquim, Lawrence English + Stephen Vitiello, The Beautiful Schizophonic + Tu M'.
2010 05 15
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on Further Noise: “ There's a Cocteau quotation accompanying Monochromes Vol. 1 which, along with the title, signals its ambit: ‘A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary, a painter too many colors on his palette, a musician too many notes on his keyboard.’ This points to the deliberately reduced palette deployed by Tu M', and a clearly minimalist flag flown over its aesthetic. On the linked video material, Tu M' reduce the number of colours to one or two shades, and limit the quantity of notes in their creations, further underlined by the terse track titles. Despite the minimalist manifesto, and their ostensibly undeveloped nature, its vistas are far from monochromatic in their veiled enigmatic quality. One of the videos is of an imperceptibly shifting landscape that gradually changes as ridges rise and fall; it's so subtle you hardly notice it in its instance of occurrence – a nice illustration of the album's dynamic: little seems to happen, yet your ears are on guard to pick up the minute microvariations as they come. To tweak Eno, it's music that can be ignored and remain interesting, but becomes more interesting the less you ignore it. There are beautiful sounds here, but they're deliberately obscured, emplaced with the most liminal of presences. The likes of Monochrome 02 may be Basinski indebted, but to speak in terms of its being derivative would be misguided, as these days in the ambient drone and neoclassical minimalism ambit, it seems increasingly like we are dealing with a shared sonic lexis of gentle motion and diaphanous timbres – one that doesn't belong to anyone, and at their best, as on the gorgeous elegiacs of Monochrome 03, Tu M' show themselves worthy of consideration among its most eloquent articulators. ” — Alan Lockett
2010 03 30
A new interview with TU M' on Headphone Commute – Two and a half questions with… “ TU M' gives us an in-depth interview, revealing the origin of their name, the process of sound sourcing, recording and performing. Very enlightening… ”.
2010 03 30
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on Headphone Commute: “ Monochromes Vol. 1 is the first volume of archival installations by the Italian multimedia duo, Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, performing under the moniker TU M'. The name, taken from Marcel Duchamp's same titled painting, is a French expression in which the verb is missing (tu m'…). This literally translates to ‘you […] me’, where the missing verb must be provided by the viewer (of the painting), or, in this case, the listener. The album, released on Richard Chartier's LINE Records, features the first four (out of nine) audio compositions, created for ‘two laptops, two mixing boards, two loudspeakers, one video projector, [and] one room.’ These pieces were recorded live at Vico Santa Chiara Studio, Città Sant'Angelo, Italy in the summer of 2008. For the installation, the duo create an atmosphere where ‘sound and light vibrations reverberate inside the room, blending together in an enveloping monochrome, that creates an atmosphere to be contemplated.’ The visuals, available as excerpts on the TU M's website, are composed of drawn out monochrome landscapes, resembling distant mountain silhouettes and sluggish geometric figures, visible in change and movement only through sporadic skipping through the captures. Attempting careful observation, or trying to make out patterns that are not there, is futile. It's like watching yourself age in the mirror. It's like watching the clouds… The audio compositions paint the same picture. Over a slight white noise hiss and endless loops, the melody swells in ambient waves of sound, sparkling in the light of distant piano notes. Like the waves of an ocean that have been crashing against this beach for thousands of years, and many years to come, this music is new and ancient – it exists _all_ the time, somewhere completely on its own, only to be summoned into this moment with the press of a button. The sounds fade in and out with the rhythm of my breathing. Inhale soft pads. Exhale minor chords. Let this pattern wash away all worries. And when the [almost] 30 minute track ends, the melody is still there, in the background of my mind. To round off this exploration of space, sound, and light, intertwined together to create this minimal composition, the duo includes a quote by Jean Cocteau: ‘A poet always has too many words in his vocabulary, a painter too many colors on his palette, a musician too many notes on his keyboard.’ Check out previous numerous releases by TU M' by rummaging through their sound and visual works, carefully catalogued on their website. Their project under the name of Steno, for example, describing themselves as ‘a world made up of second-hand music’, is released on their own, Mr. Mutt label, which, not coincidentally, is the name Marcel Duchamp signed on the upside down urinal, and named his found art as Fountain. ” — HC
2010 03 16
The TU M's still tum_monochrome_09+V06_[still].jpg taken from the video Monochrome # 09+V06 of 2009, will be presented at group exhibition Still Show Around Iceland by 700IS Festival 2010 – Various locations around Iceland: Reykjavik Art Museum, CIA Center of Icelandic Art, LHI-Iceland Academy of the Arts, Nes Artist Residency – From 18th to 27th March 2010 – With: Various Artists.
2010 02 25
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on Neural: “ Released under the moniker Tu M' (Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli), an interesting and all Italian mixed media project is unraveled in a rather airy and meditative way for the prestigious Line label. Since 2000, Line has been curated and directed by Richard Chartier, a sound/installation artist and graphic designer among the greatest names in the microsound scene. The environmental structures are very effective and reverberate in a very dilated and modular way, in delicate and atmospheric disturbances, converging in vivid laptop articulations, synergic in their poetic iterations and audio-video confluences. The scores of the four different monochromes are organized in the manner of hypnotic digital sketches, though it is the continuum that stands out from the overall structure, vibrating with airy loop-based montages. The textures are only apparently static, but are in fact rich in layers and resonances, perhaps stemming from a crystalline desire for synthesis, of a newfound lightness or a state of grace, unintelligible in their deep orchestral resonances, but definitely evocative and rich in multidisciplinary suggestions. ” — Aurelio Cianciotta
2010 02 09
Now available the new – TU M' SHOP – with high quality Audio Downloads, Video Downloads and CDs. Soon: Catalogues and Prints.
2010 01 25
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on The Milk Factory: “ Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli have been at the helm of the multimedia project Tu M' for over twelve years now, experimenting with music, video and photography for works going from records, released on labels as diverse as Phthalo, Headz, Fällt, Bip-Hop, Dekoder or ERS, to installations in museums and galleries around the world. One of such projects is Monochromes, which the pair describe as ‘a collection of modular audio and video compositions for two laptops, two mixing boards, two loudspeakers, one video projector, one room’, with the performance revolving around sound and light reverberating across a room. Monochromes Vol. 1, which collects four of the nine compositions documented on the band's website, focuses solely on the sonic dimension of the project, and offers no real clue as to what the accompanying visuals are, apart for the washed out blue image of the cover, taken from a still of one of the accompanying videos. Yet, the resolutely eerie aspect of the picture, showing the vague outlines of what appear to be a landscape in the distance, resonates through the slow build up of soundscapes that characterises the four tracks collected here. Shrouded in dense clouds of reverbs, from which vague contours of looped melodies occasionally rise, it is impossible to identify with certainty any of the components used by Tu M'. Occasionally, one could be forgiven for hearing a distant orchestra, a lone organ or a heavily processed wall of guitars, but the composition of the sonic fabric of these pieces is a close guarded secret. What matters here is not so much the content of these as the atmospheric context resulting of the process applied. While Monochrome # 01, #02 and # 03 rely on fairly clear melodic themes, which, developed over their respective course, slowly build up layers to show increased relief, the thirty minute epic Monochrome # 04, with its long overlapping drones, is totally devoid of any recognisable musical feature, and instead accentuates greatly on the purely textural aspect of the work. Recorded live over the course of two different performances, Monochromes Vol. 1 is a fascinating journey through particularly dense and enigmatic soundscapes. With the visual side of the project removed, it is difficult to evaluate it in full, yet the four compositions presented here actually work particularly well as stand-alone ambient pieces. 4.2/5 ” — The Milk Man
2010 01 13
The TU M's composition Strange Sleep from the album Just One Night (Dekorder, 2005) was inserted in the compilation 14 Tracks: Psychedelic Wanderlust by Boomkat.
2010 01 11
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on Fail: “ It was on their 2004 release for the Irish-label Fallt, the curiously titled Pop Involved [Ver 3.0] that I discovered the joyous works of Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli aka Tu M' (named after the painting by Marcel Duchamp, but you knew that). Occupying the same sonic space as William Basinski; this is intense, processed work that possesses an off-world beauty. Controlled use of decay and difussion results in four tracks of contemporary ambient music; from slow burn drone pieces to ghostly orchestration and looped guitar. An overwhelmingly emotional experience. ” — Sheikh Ahmed
2010 01 09
New review for Monochromes Vol. 1 on The Silent Ballet: “ Jean Cocteau once wrote that ‘a musician [always has] too many notes on his keyboard.’ Tu M' will likely never be accused of having such a problem. Ambient music must always allow for introspection, but few albums have carried this goal further than Monochromes Vol. 1, which almost legitimately sounds like music from the womb. The duo has been plying its trade for almost a decade now, but with its first release for Richard Chartier's Line label, it appears to be seeing the fruition of its hard work and is well on the way to hitting a comfortable mid-career stride. As an audio/visual project, the album is somewhat incomplete without its film accompaniment, but I'll be damned if it isn't still incredibly satisfying on its own. This is one of the slowest and most majestic albums of the year. ” — Tom Butcher
2010 01 08
The British magazine The Wire voted the album Monochromes Vol. 1 among the 15 best releases of 2009 in the area of electronic music. It was also voted in various Best of 2009 lists:
– Boomkat, Top 100 albums of 2009, Position #40
– Battiti, RAI Radio3 + BlowUp, Playlist 2009, by Nicola Catalano
– Headphone Commute, Best of 2009
– The Silent Ballet, The top 50 releases of 2009, Position #33
– Earlabs, 10 best albums in 2009, Position #3, by Sietse van Erve
– Igloo Magazine, Ambient top 10, by Alan Lockett
Thank You!