13 [private sounds

sps25100 - to be released on November 28th, 2025

ANACLETO VITOLO / HISEKA / GIGI MASIN / FABIO ORSI
A SAD SONG FOR A.

Deluxe 4CD Box, includes four individual 17x17cm booklets with photographs by Stefano Gentile and texts by Giulia Dal Vecchio, an hand numbered insert, a postcard and a bookmark, ltd. 300 copies

“a sad song for A.”: when art becomes the voice of emotions

«The project “a sad song for A.” was born from an insight Stefano Gentile had, driven by his moods and, in particular, a regret he had experienced in the past. It all began almost by chance, one evening, during an informal conversation. Stefano suggested that I narrate what I was experiencing most intensely at that moment: anxiety.
After thoroughly analyzing this emotional state, he asked me to translate it into words, to write texts that could give voice to the emotions surrounding it. From there, came the idea of dividing the emotional journey into four stages that, in one way or another, we have all experienced: Panic, Anxiety, Light, and Dream.
This is how Stefano involved me in this project, which combines writing, photography, and music with a specific goal: to make people feel less alone, creating an invisible thread of empathy through words, images, and sounds. In this way, “a sad song for A.” came to life and taught us – and continues to teach us – to feel closer to one another, to strike common inner chords, to remember that no one is truly alone when going through darkness, and that it is essential to never stop dreaming.» Giulia Dal Vecchio

In addition to Stefano Gentile and Giulia Dal Vecchio, “a sad song for A.” also features Gigi Masin, Fabio Orsi, Anacleto Vitolo, and a new multimedia project called Hiseka (Stefano Gentile and Giulia Dal Vecchio with various guests).
“a sad song for A.” is released as a deluxe box set containing four CDs and four 12-pages booklets, 17x17cm in size. The box is limited to 300 hand-numbered copies. Each musician worked on a phase of anxiety, creating a dedicated and original work. Stefano created the images and Giulia wrote the texts. Each of the four parts was given a title that is also the title of the sound work.

Anacleto Vitolo: Falling into a vortex of sick stars (for Panic)

Hiseka: Drowning in a sea of dust (for Anxiety)

Gigi Masin: Imploding in a blinding darkness (for Light)

Fabio Orsi: Listening to the sound of sunflowers (for Dream)

Gigi Masin's work is also available as two separate vinyl records, which feature two additional extra tracks not included in the CD version contained in the box set. In addition to the standard black vinyl edition, the two records are also released on clear vinyl in a limited edition of 200 hand-numbered copies each.
Four videos (one for each CD) are also available for streaming on Silentes’ YouTube channel, one made by Francesco Giannico and three made by Francesco Paladino.

“a sad song for A.” by Paolo Bertoni (Blow Up magazine)

The convergence of poetry, photography, and sound in a multimedia work that explores one of the most common and feared emotional states: anxiety. A feeling of unease, sometimes even an existential state, paralyzing and challenging. In the folds of “a sad song for A.”, the lowercase initials of the title seem to want to temper, in a form of modesty that brings the events back to an intimate room, perhaps inaccessible to others, the emphasis inherent in regret, whatever it may be, hidden in the background of the entire project. Stefano Gentile's images and Giulia Dal Vecchio's words are the connecting element of an ideal continuum that is the lyrical representation of the evolutionary process of a discomfort that can never be considered definitively completed or finally eradicated, with the uncertainty that it may resurface remaining latent, alive.

I am made up of millions of stars that continuously implode, fall, and die, generating new ones, while the sick ones fall to the ground. Near my feet.
Don't you try to save them? No, you leave them there, to their fate.

The start is fraught with difficulties, with Anacleto Vitolo's “Precipitando in un vortice di stelle malate” (Falling into a vortex of sick stars), the sound representation of panic, the starting point of this inner journey between the senses and reason, without it being clear which component will be of greater help. After a piano intro by Michele Borsoi, chosen as a slender thread that binds together diverse fragments, a dark ambient sound with thunderous variations bursts in with a forceful impact, in a dissociation that bubbles with traces of noise. A pause in which the illusion arises that the grip is loosening and everything is passing, an impending threat translated into the rumble of an approaching storm, in a projection outside oneself celestial synths resound, albeit disturbed by noisy cracks, and the beating rises, heart palpitations, at the climax of the attack, the caution of immobility that turns into a block of anguish, abrasive roughness creeps in, an exhausting and relentless loop, hypnotic and obsessive percussion on a buzzing post-industrial backdrop. The fallen “sick stars” remain visible, certainly not alleviating the fear that their fate is to be joined by other, fallen, “stars”.

I look at myself in the mirror without recognising my face, nor masks, or my features, but I glimpse an image taking on a vague appearance in the dusty reflection, drowned in a sea of dust.
I am many things at once: many colors, many shapes that change and intertwine, inside me there is also anxiety. It is part of my being.

From panic to anxiety, the key transition in this tortuous, anguished journey. It is Dal Vecchio and Gentile themselves, with the new Hiseka moniker and the support of Fabio Orsi, Vitolo and Borsoi, who deal with it in “Affogando in un mare di polvere” (Drowning in a sea of dust). Laboured breathing in a drone dimension, pulsations in the silence, melancholically cosmic syntheses, a heart that returns to beating irregularly over a texture of field recordings that seems to obscure it, subdued Eno-esque panoramas, gentle and deeply solitary gravity touched by piano notes that descend listlessly, like timid drops of longed-for and unfulfilled rain, a piano that then loses control, struggling, dirtied by glitches that seem to accumulate until they become overwhelming waves. Silences reign supreme, the only sound perceived is “indeterminate, infinite, perpetual” pain, spaces vast enough for the awareness to creep in that the remedy is not to expel anxiety, but to invest in it, perhaps through aesthetic shortcuts, so that it becomes a magmatic force.

Light does not end with the sunset: it remains in memories, in desires, in breaths and in the heart.
Everywhere.
Perhaps I have not lost it. It has only changed form, mutated language.
It has chosen another way to reach me: it does not pass through the eyes, but through the skin, through memory, through the passing of time.
That is how, even without seeing it, I know that the light is still inside.

Gigi Masin's sparkling sonic magic leads us to the light in “Implodendo in una accecante oscurità” (Imploding in a blinding darkness). The mirror reflects nothing but a faint, unfamiliar, mysteriously hostile face, but a glimmer survives, evoked by a painfully solemn romanticism that is salvific, glimmers of light bounce off broad synthetic volutes, a bewitching ambient, airy quiet, they spread, a few veins of darkness shine through, aesthetic beauty equates to clear spirituality, sax and female voices, the elegy that intertwines piano and vocal loops, that omnipresent melancholy, nostalgia, reassuring, which is openness to tomorrow. It is the moment of light, the powerful feeling that nothing is lost, that what awaits to be grasped is more than a remnant, perhaps an overcoming, light that “is not what it shows but what it reveals”, that light that becomes memory that does not need to illuminate to be perceived where it most needs to spread, where darkness has resided for too long.

I hear a sweet melody in the distance and a voice whispering to me to keep floating and not to abandon this dream.
I follow its route, to grasp it, but the closer I get, the more it dissolves.
I stop to commit it to memory.
To merge, to flow together, to become one with it, a harmony.
The dream continue.

Opening up to dreams, returning to dreams, giving them another chance, even retracing one's steps, a way to recalibrate their boundaries and colours. Fabio Orsi's “Ascoltando il rumore dei girasoli” (Listening to the sound of sunflowers), with its escapist voluptuousness, goes beyond those ruins, no longer contemplating them, in the wake of a reflective ambience, in a soft and vaporous form of post-rock, on a neutral drone base of lost melodies, yet romantic, caressing melancholy with a mild warmth, a cosmic thread that crosses the clouds, the utmost delicacy of rarefactions and celestial breaths between piano drops, opposing forces that thicken and overlap without conflict, following multiple directions until an airy finale, where dreaming is believing and one may also fear that waking up is the beginning of the dream.

“a sad song for A.” by Marco Pandin

Music like this did not exist back then. Those were different times, and it wasn't easy to navigate the sea of fascinations. Certain musicians stirred up storms in that sea, storms that mixed with other ideological tempests from which it was often impossible to escape, especially for those who struggled to make out the contours of the coastline and clung to some chemical, ideological, or mystical lifebuoy - and unfortunately shipwrecked anyway.

Music like this did not exist in the past. Certain musicians, deviating from their respective paths of relative creative and commercial tranquility, began to try, experiment, dream aloud, and throw stones that rippled the sea of sound itself in a pattern of circles that generated billions of high waves and has not yet found calm.

Music like this did not exist in the past because no one thought it possible. People devoted themselves to building careers and consolidating personalities. Or they chose silence.

Music like this did not exist once, but today it does. I don't know if I am listening to the fruit of malaise and obsessions, stubbornness, sleepless nights, or nights that turn into sunny mornings - probably it's a combination of all of these. Each, in its own way, is a rumble of thunder that draws me out to that sea. A suite in constant evolution, as long as life itself. .

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