Non Mountain

Non Mountain is a collaboration with Chrystal Cherniwchan and Craig Tattersall where the two tracks on a 10″ vinyl and the 84 pages of a book explore mappings of real and imaginary journeys to high places in text, sound and photographic images – and the ways all these can come together and fall apart.

A recursive project, all the elements passed back and forth between the collaborators, each stage accumulating layers that processed what had gone before. One first step in our looping method came from the soundtracks to two films I made with Chiara Caterina – "Il Vertice" (2013) and "Into The Outside" (2015): Chrystal and Craig took the films’ original unvoiced subtitles and had them spoken by Alessio Sancetta, they mixed in new field recordings, re-sequenced the material and added all kinds of instruments to make completely new music.

The textures, rhythms and densities of the two 14 minute tracks find all kinds of connections to the written and printed materials that gather poems, lists, field notes, adapted photographs, fragments of maps and scans of leaves.

A reconfigured version of the sound and image material was exhibited at DIVFUSE Gallery Feb 14 - 17, 2025.

The work was presented at "The Expanded Librarian" symposium at CRASSH at the University of Cambridge, September, 2023.

The review from Boomkat described the project: "Using source material including original sound and field recordings made during spring in the Southern Italian mountains of the Picentini national park, the trio produced a two-part concrète and electro-acoustic collage entitled ‘Non Mountain’. The collaborative work impressionistically expounds upon and transforms the work with a captivating, sound sensitive nuance where source sounds are isolated, magnified and rearranged to form a dreamlike suite of barometric flux and changing sceneries underfoot and overhead.

The A-side stealthily lures you along a coarse-textured scree up to vertiginous, quietly breathtaking ambient pads where we intercept the scrambled texts of the original piece and inclement weather, before the B-side follows the course of gravity and water down into more forested zones and sublime glades flush with diffused, GAS-like string loop harmonics, industrial clanks and distant voices with an exquisite timbral frisson."