A Closer Listen
“It personally feels like the discovery of a new path awaiting exploration,” writes Marco Paltrinieri about Otto Studi (Eight Studies). With this album, the Italian artist appears to abandon any narrative drive: vocals are gone, and any intrusion of fictional or literary framing—once suggested through evocative titles or references to Joseph Conrad in earlier works such as Ripari Minimi—is now neutralised.
Instead, we are given only locations scattered across the Cévennes region in France—the album was recorded in Chalap in mid-July 2025—their geographic coordinates functioning as bare data, a record of time and place. This stripped-back, empirical approach restricts the palette to electric guitar and a handful of pedals. Notes are no longer permitted to bloom into the resonant microcosms of ambience that once allowed musique concrète textures to develop; they are held closer, more contained, and resistant to narrative suggestion.
With Otto Studi, Paltrinieri turns toward the interstices of sound, encouraging the pedals to act as subtle perturbing forces, with fuzz blurring edges rather than overwhelming them. Sonic droplets fall without ripples, suspended within an aural canvas that feels bracketed by silence. Yet despite their brevity, these pieces do not register as fragments. Each study carries the weight of intention, unfolding as a fully realised sketch rather than a tentative note.
Paltrinieri proves attentive to small gestures, to the spaces between tones, and to the quiet discipline of reduction. What emerges is a work of restraint and focus, where absence becomes a compositional tool and listening itself is gently recalibrated.
To guide us through the making of the album, we reached out to Marco Paltrinieri via email.
photo by Alan Chies
Your previous works such as The Weaver, L’Altra Parte, and Ripari Minimi often combined sound with narrative, spoken text, literature, and speculative reflection. With Otto Studi, all of that seems to disappear, leaving only electric guitar, pedals, and the names of places in the Cévennes. What led you toward this radical reduction, and did it feel like a liberation or a constraint?
When I recorded The Weaver and L’Altra Parte I was coming back to music after a 12 year hiatus. It was also the first time ever I was making music via a DAW. Sonically, those records were essentially collages assembled on my laptop using manipulated samples and a few midi synths to glue everything together. My main goal was to provide a soundscape for texts that I wrote while doing research as a visual artist.
While working on those projects, my appetite for music-making grew exponentially and I pretty soon realized that I didn’t really enjoy being stuck in front of a screen. Basically, I missed the interaction with a “real” instrument. So, halfway through the making of Ripari Minimi I decided to go back to the guitar, my primary instrument, which I had literally not touched for ten years. I understood that focusing on an instrument could have been good for me. It was a time in my life in which I needed to engage in activities that required more practice and manual dexterity. Also, I was after a change in my approach to art too, looking for something that could fit in and resonate more with my daily life. For all these reasons the guitar, its rediscovery and study, felt like the perfect choice. This is pretty much the path that led me to Otto Studi and to its reductionist approach which feels both like an achievement and a liberation.
The eight pieces are named after locations—Tourrières, Chalap, Vialas, Sénéchas, and others—rather than concepts, stories, or characters. Were these titles intended as simple markers of time and place, or do they suggest a form of sonic cartography in which each study becomes linked to a particular landscape and moment of listening?
They are just markers, nothing more. The family of my partner owns a house in the Cévennes, a fairly wild area in the south of the Massif Central in France, where I spend time every summer. I’ve always been fascinated and inspired by the landscape of the area, especially of the Mount Lozère, a massive plateau with rocky conformations that hold a strong sculptural quality. Otto Studi has been entirely recorded and assembled in the area and it is definitely influenced by it. The titles of the tracks are places where I hanged around or hiked while recording the album. I simply associated the names of the locations to the tracks according to personal moods and feelings.
On social media you described Otto Studi as “the discovery of a new path awaiting exploration.” What exactly felt new to you during the making of these recordings? Was it a different relationship with the guitar itself, with improvisation, or with silence and restraint as compositional tools?
Well, first of all I recorded the whole thing in a few days, which is already something entirely new for me considering that I’ve always been quite slow with all my previous projects. I must say that before Otto Studi I had already recorded and dismissed a couple of guitar based albums so I guess it was just a matter of time but still, such spontaneity felt very refreshing. Also, through Otto Studi I found a modus operandi, a combination of improvisation and composition, that suits me and that I can now apply to different contexts and approaches to the instrument. Finally, I’ve been working for quite some time on a guitar sound – a balance of melody and noise, shape and deconstruction, accident and control – that I simply couldn’t achieve. With Otto Studi something unlocked, allowing me to reach a territory of creative comfort where I can dwell.
Imbriani
A recurring theme across your artistic work—whether through Discipula’s visual research, the speculative narratives of The Weaver, or the domestic spaces explored in Imbriani and Ripari Minimi—has been an attention to what lies beneath the visible surface. In Materia Breve, Luca Lanfredi’s accompanying poem speaks of meaning emerging from “the long-lasting breach between things” and of reality being infinitely porous. Do you see Otto Studi as another way of exploring those interstices, this time without words, through small sonic gestures and the spaces between sounds?
I find it very nice that you mentioned Lanfredi’s poem from Materia Breve. Vittorio Guindani is, in fact, not only a good friend but also a collaborator and an inspiration for me. This said, I think you really got the point. As I mentioned in my reply to your first question, a few years ago I reached a point in which I felt the need to move away from the speculative narratives I’ve been dealing with before (both in music and visual arts) and somehow focus on the observation of life, pure and simple. Ripari Minimi and Imbriani are both steps in this direction, although strongly self centered. Through the sonic language of Otto Studi I’m starting to reflect on something more universal: the here and now as well as the tiny nuances and epiphanies of everyday life which is the ultimate source of mystery and magic.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
Sun Jun 28 00:01:04 GMT 2026