Love Me Radically

Solo Performance, DIY prepared multichannel sound system, 2023

Love Me Radically is an autobiographical reflection on emotional addictions: affective traps resulting from deep-seated imbalances, gaps that we attempt to fill by seeking in another person what we are looking for in ourselves.
Love Me Radically is the culmination, personal and not definitive, of this search.

Love Me Radically is the backlash of an individual raised on instability, who once rediscovered affection became addicted to it. To the point of collapsing on himself, fooling himself to use such feeling as a shield toward the insecurity that has alienated him from everyone and from himself.

Love Me Radically is a search for a collective, radical and unfulfillable embrace.

The audience is invited to get as close as possible to the performance instruments, almost to enter the "embrace" they describe on the floor.

Love Me Radically is an improvisational solo performance for DIY prepared multichannel sound system. Using 9 recycled speakers, mostly from old cathode ray tube televisions, a multi-channel system was constructed with the most lo-fi characteristics possible. The speakers that compose it are placed without their sound boxes on the floor, so as to describe a half-moon open to the audience. The performer interacts with the system in various ways, which alternate in an unscripted pattern during the performance. The speakers play algorithmically generated multichannel audio, spatialized in an automated manner between the various speakers. Since these are recycled speakers, the result is strongly non-linear and has colorations given by the specific characteristics of each speaker (or pair of speakers). In addition, the preparation of each speaker through various objects changes its emission characteristics, adding resonances and further filtering the generated audio. Speakers also reproduce infrasonic signal, organized through a sequencer. This type of signal is not audible to the human ear but is capable of exciting the membranes of the speakers, resonating the materials used for preparation: bells, rattles, coins, drums and metal containers are applied to the speakers, giving rise to heterorhythmic concatenations also modulated by the performer's intervention.