A Closer Listen
The cover of Riccardo La Foresta’s ZERO, 999… depicts an impossibly tall spiral tower vanishing into the sky, an aptly disorienting visual metaphor for an album that dismantles traditional notions of drumming. Here, drums are not rhythmic anchors but vessels for breath, sustain, and drone—gestural yet devoid of traditional pulse, animated by instability and flux. La Foresta’s practice centers around the drummophone, an instrument of his own invention he began developing in 2015, when he first experimented with blowing air through a cymbal attached to a drum. Forged from a decade of research expanding his process—through live performance, improvisation, and installation—ZERO, 999… is a conceptually focused and compositionally sophisticated album worthy of the status as La Foresta’s official debut.
In Drummophone’s Manifesto, La Foresta asks a simple question: “What is a drum?” Traditionally, drums are membranophones, in which a stretched membrane is struck to produce a sound. The introduction of a new technique—vibrating the membrane with air—transforms the drum into an aerophone, making the drummophone closer to a kazoo or harmonium than a snare. As he notes in his manifesto, “while using it, it’s possible to obtain acoustic drones, melodies, and complex beats that drastically distance the instrument from traditional drumming and gestures.” The six tracks on Drummophone (2020) demonstrate the breadth of sounds that La Foresta can coax out of his instrument, ranging from low rumbling drones to teeth-tingling feedback, gentle coos to whimsical pitch oscillations and metallic skittering. As a proof of concept, those recordings led to opportunities to mount installations, with La Foresta often finding himself as the “acoustic set” at electronic festivals.
Not content to flatten his live performances and in-situ installation work into stereo audio recordings, on ZERO, 999…, La Foresta enters a new phase of his career, using the drummophone as a sound library from which to develop a new compositional language. The timbral expression of the drummophone shifts across the record; as La Foresta describes it, “at times it resembles a clarinet arpeggio, at others a deep, percussive rumble or even a square-wave-style synth.” Many of the sounds heard on ZERO, 999… have been further transformed in the studio, looped and resampled and layered to produce something yet again new. And while the drummophone is present on every track, La Foresta also plays more traditional percussion, beating his drums and sometimes bowing cymbals, presenting further possibilities for experimentation.
The album opens with “Drawdown,” a dynamic interplay of electronic textures and traditional drum sounds integrated with the drummophone, generating oscillating high-pitched screeches and subterranean resonance. The opening 30 seconds form a kind of unit, which structures the duration of the piece, but absent time-keeping percussion, the music takes on a drifting character that sets it apart from the kind of music we might expect from a drummer-composer. This is percussion as texture, as atmosphere, resulting in some of the most affecting electroacoustic music you’ll hear this year. And while far from pop, at just over 3 minutes in length, it is digestible antipasto before getting into the album proper. In fact–with “Xhakers” the longest composition at 4:43, and “angelica chiurgia” the shortest at 1:26, and clocking in at a total runtime of 35 minutes–the record demonstrates an economy of craft rare in experimental music.
While solo percussion albums do exist–particularly in experimental music–it should be unsurprising that collaboration plays a key role across ZERO, 999…, with La Foresta calling in some help to augment his compositions. “Drums, percussion, and strange textures were already there,” he tells me, so he focused on what was missing, soliciting wordless vocals, electric guitars, and various electronic contributions. “HOLD” is the first of six songs to feature Ale Hop on electric guitar, an intense counterpoint to La Foresta’s furious drum hits. Sara Persico also contributes vocal ASMR to the track, though the effect is perhaps more disconcerting than euphoric. Hop is joined by Valerio Tricoli and Anthony Pateras on the next track, “20230704_102400.jpg,” the two granting a profound acousmatic depth to the proceedings, an airy affair that builds in waves of static. La Foresta cites Pateras’ compositional approach as particularly influential in structuring the record, having worked closely with the Australian artist alongside Stefano Pilia in the noise rock trio Sulla Lingua.
The entire b-side is even more engrossing, beginning with “The Lower Primate In Us 2,” featuring tape processing by Renato Grieco (kNN). Full of charged silences, the buzz of stabbing tones, and reverberant virtual voices, “Prima” further develops those same elements–the two tracks might as well be one composition in two parts–but with more insistent drums driving the momentum. “Xhakers” is the longest track on the album, and with powerful fuzz courtesy of Aleksandra Słyż (synth), Adam Jełowicki (tenor sax), and Gerard Lebik (soprano sax), may be the most climactic. Antonina Nowacka, who grants an angelic chorus to “Calco,” returns to get cut up on “angelica chiurgia” [angelic surgery]. Pilia’s modular treated guitar on the stunning closing track “Eye Contact (Nereo’s)” is a reminder of his utter singularity as an artist and one of the most vital guitar players working today. Ending on a decisive downbeat, quickly fading out the silence, the record begs to be flipped over and played again.
Yet despite these layers of process and collaboration which make the record so rich of a listen, the core of ZERO, 999… remains La Foresta’s playing, always rooted in physicality. “I call myself a percussionist, but in reality, I’m a drummer,” he admits. As I’ve argued elsewhere, percussionists make for particularly interesting composers, something I asked La Foresta to reflect upon. “Composition is just a natural extension of playing drums… the body becomes a compositional tool.” Movement and its absence, like sound and silence, both carry meaning, and La Foresta has had to create new gestures to adapt to the novelty of the drummophone, resulting in a compositional language that is “a choreography of sound, motion, and space.” The often cryptic titles, combined with the album artwork, also hints at a deeper conceptual guide.
The album’s title reflects its philosophical underpinnings. As with the cover art, La Foresta was drawn to the “idea of something that appears infinite, but isn’t.” The ellipses at the end of the title are the mathematical symbol for a repeating decimal, representing infinite approximation, a process that is always heading towards a resolution it never quite reaches. As he elaborates, “0.999… seems to be in constant motion, while 1 is completely still, like feedback, also. For me, the analogy is that the process is the result.” This tension between motion and stasis mirrors La Foresta’s own artistic evolution: from jazz-trained drummer to installation artist, from durational performances to studio composition. “By limiting physical presence and gesture, I’ve moved away from technical virtuosity… The live experience, once centered on movement, has become an opportunity for collective investigation.”
While working on composing and recomposing this album, La Foresta found inspiration in Italo Calvino’s 1973 novel, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, in which the protagonists are stuck in a castle unable to speak, conveying their stories with tarot cards instead. “One by one, their narratives begin to intertwine on the table, forming a complex, entangled plot. It felt like the perfect metaphor for what was happening with this record—organically taking shape out of pure chaos.” Interestingly, the Tower card is missing from their deck, a card which anticipates a fall, an unraveling that makes way for reinvention. Likewise, ZERO, 999…., which returns the tower on its cover, feels like both a culmination and a dissolution. It is percussion stripped of certainty, where every strike is a question, every breath a recomposition. (Joseph Sannicandro)
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Mon Sep 08 00:01:40 GMT 2025