By Andrew Choate
This is the third part of a three-part review of the full 35th edition
of the
AngelicA festival
in Bologna.
The first part can be read here
; the
second part there.
 |
| Unless indicated otherwise, photos are by author |
May 26, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Wacław Zimpel & SAAGARA
Wacław Zimpel - electronics, clarinet
Giridhar Udupa - ghatam, vocals
Aggu Baba - khanjira, vocals
Mysore N. Karthik - violin
Camilo Tirado - sound technician
Speaking of music that radiates both the calm and the whirlwind within,
enter SAAGARA. The four performers in this decade-long collaboration sat
cross-legged on a raised platform, draped in colorful, loosely worn fabrics,
and produced a vivid amalgamation of ancient and modern musical practices.
Wacław Zimpel’s electronic sequences, generated live from his computer,
served as a kind of digital śruti—a tonal center—but one
embellished with rhythm and occasional glitch. Think of Praed’s electrified
Arabic hyper-pop filtered through the lush digital excess of Romanian
manele, but using Indian source music as the palette. Add to that two
outrageously gifted live percussionists, Mysore N. Karthik’s smooth,
grounded and sentimental electric violin, and Zimpel’s often jazzy,
multiphonic clarinet. Weird. Good weird. Great weird. Weird weird. These
were the moods the music moved through – not genres.
 |
|
Wacław Zimpel & SAAGARA. Photo by Silvio Camassa |
The soundscape layered clarinet over dense, percussive ornamentation, all
framed by ever-present, ornate electronics. It felt like this band was
grappling with how to honor tradition amid the onslaught of digital noise –
and their answer was: groove with it. Fast, synchronized vocal passages
(like swarakalpana and korvais) unfolded in complex
rhythmic patterns, punctuated by an unruly stream of digital flurries –
from Wurlitzer-style keyboard loops to turntable-like scratches. The crowd
was into it. The sixty-ish woman beside me filmed several extended (10+
minute) sequences on her phone, each capped off with a satisfied
“bellissimo.”
Giridhar Udupa, who co-wrote the music with Zimpel, played ghatam like it
was a full drum kit and a sacred object at once. During one song, he rocked
it back-and-forth in rhythm toward his chest to mute it, and the depth of
its resonance became even more pronounced in that suspended moment just
before it was covered. He coaxed an astonishing variety of textures from
it: crisp clicks from knuckles and nails, booming thumps from his palms.
The fusion of rhythmic and melodic ideas from Western and Carnatic
traditions didn’t land in any clear genre – and didn’t need to. It moved in
ways that the grateful audience found instinctually joyful. The intuitions
guiding the musicians to create this hybrid require no conscious
explanation or prior knowledge when the result is so immediately recognized
and beloved.
May 27, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Piccolo Coro Angelico
Arianna Carletti,
Agata Casari, Arturo Vespignani, Aurora Tuveri, Clelia Fontana, Cordelia
Vonmetz, Federico Cattabriga, Giordano Brembilla, Giulia Masotti, Ida
Guidotti, Leonardo Igor Provvisionato, Lucia Carbone, Maya Schipilova, Tea
Fidanza
Angelica Foschi - piano
Francesco Serra - electric guitar, acoustic guitar
Giovanna Giovannini - direction and coordination
Silvia Tarozzi - conducting
Molecole, Bruno Lauzi
Flakes, Steve Lacy, Tiziana Simona
Distratta, Silvia Tarozzi
Latte e biscotti, Piccolo Coro Angelico, Silvia Tarozzi
Peace, trad., arrangement Giovanna Giovannini
Verdi Prati, George Frideric Handel
Discese tulipano, Mirco Mariani
Le cose bella, Piccolo Coro Angelico, Silvia Tarozzi
Aldo, Luciano Berio
This performance marked the fourteenth appearance of the Piccolo Coro
Angelico at the festival. The children’s choir rehearses once a week from
October through May to prepare for this moment. The theatre itself was
transformed – decorated with the kids’ own drawings, paintings, and
collages of trees. Onstage, they wore white lab coats personalized with
buttons, doodles, and whatever configurations their imaginations allowed.
 |
| Piccolo Coro. Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
I especially appreciated Molecole, the opening number: a chorus of
competing animal sounds, followed by bouncy, jovial lyrics and a return to
the barnyard for a feast of animaliciousness.What followed
was a well-considered program of eight more songs, combining playful
textures—windy whooshes, wild laughter—with moments of proper choral
beauty. One young gentleman delivered an impeccably polished solo during
Peace, arranged by the choir’s patient yet determined director,
Giovanna Giovannini.
Le cose belle, one of two original pieces developed by the choir
and their inspiring conductor Silvia Tarozzi, felt like a real hit: Serra’s
guitar riffs were instant hooks, and the choir’s counterpoint—with voices
split into sections—gave the arrangement real depth. I could hear the kids
in the audience behind me yelping and dancing in their seats. After the
encore—some things must remain secret—I caught one of the performers with a
look of pure, stunned joy on her face, like a deer caught in the headlights
of her own sudden emotion. One of the many quiet miracles this festival has
been offering for decades.
May 28, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Mariam Rezaei
Pat Thomas
Mariam Rezaie + Pat Thomas
 |
| Pat Thomas. Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
One of the characteristics that makes Pat Thomas a legendary musical voice,
to my ears, is the sly tricksterism he slides into his music—little samples
(if he’s on electronics) or phrases (if on piano) dropped into an otherwise
logical progression, signaling the many planes he’s operating on. Tonight
was no exception. His opening electronic set jostled between wet, scribbled
samples, blasted phonetic wriggles, clangy belltower resonance and
quick-fade blister pops. Spaceship-landing intaglio mystified into
backward-vocal woodland hoots. His solo felt a bit abbreviated—maybe due to
the back-to-back-to-back ergonomics of the evening, with no breaks—but
every moment counted.
Mariam Rezaei’s turntable solo, however, took things to another level – and
then another dimension. She began with what sounded like isolated spins of
mild ’70s rock licks, in the vein of Buffalo Springfield or Little Feat.
Her gradual layering of these electric guitar riffs started inquisitively,
then grew more purposeful, as her sequencing refracted those riffs through
a prism of rhythm and texture, thereby extracting magnetic friction,
blooming resonance and a ghostly urgency. She was drawing us closer to the
music, like a consummate storyteller – then zap! she incorporated
the second turntable. And with that came an outrageous splatter of
manipulated pitches, chunked noise and fast-paced, twisted micro-cacophony.
Talking with the sound crew after the gig, we universally agreed: this
moment—and everything that followed—was the apex of the festival. She had
built such a powerful foundation of sound that the second
turntable—calculatingly introduced for maximum multidimensional
explosion—felt like an epiphany. If most turntablists, even great ones,
begin with two turntables, Rezaei makes you feel the difference
between one and two – which, in her hands, is seismic. Gerarda came up with
a perfectly accurate and Italian nickname for Rezaei: the Madonna of the
Turntables.
 |
| Mariam Rezaei. Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
Thomas seamlessly joined her onstage—no pause, no stop—and dove his piano
straight into the whirlpool of her relentless flourishing. His presence
instantly amped up the ante, the way centripetal force escalates as one
plunges into the heart of a vortex. Vinyl crackles were overemphasized into
percussive chaos while Thomas bounced springily from melody to chord
tangling. He knows how to turn a phrase into a tapestry. Rezaei reached
Amacher-like levels of room-vibrating frequency before diving into some
glorious clutter-funk, and Thomas zoned in on Love for Sale-era
Cecil Taylorisms to plomp everything along.
If she’s the Madonna of the Turntables—and she is—then Thomas is the
Prophet of the Piano.
 |
| Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
May 29, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
The Locals
Alex Ward - clarinet
Evan Thomas - electric guitar
Pat Thomas - piano
Dominic Lash - electric bass, double bass
Darren Hasson Davis - drums
Goddamn, this band was good. Whatever spark Mariam Rezaei ignited the night
before, The Locals fanned into full flame tonight. First off, it’s deeply
satisfying that Anthony Braxton—who’s long made a practice of
reinterpreting standards—is now having his original work turned
into standards. And with such love. And funk. I mean: this rhythm
section could power a continent. The first piece was full-on dirty
post-structuralist jive-bop. When this band dismantles a building like it’s
a storehouse of good jams, it’s not just one neubauten that falls
– it’s the whole neighborhood.
 |
| The Locals. Photo by Silvio Camassa |
The second tune began more abstractly, texture and wash, but you can’t keep
Braxton’s harmonic complexity—or his
soulfulness—down for long.
(Why don’t more people talk about the soulfulness in his music?
It’s right there
. This band emphasized it.) The third number felt like a blaxploitation
soundtrack crashed into a 1950s jazz club and ordered an ice-cold white
wine, on the rocks. Alex Wand’s brilliantly bastardized clarinet scrawl
complemented Pat Thomas’s clustered bangs and pounds at the piano. But
those bangs and pounds themselves were threaded with angular lyricism –
imagine Henry Cowell duetting with Andrew Hill. Evan Thomas’s spring-loaded
guitar lick—I swear it was repeating
tutto bene, tutto bene, tutto bene
—was buoyed by Darren Hasson-Davis’s hi-hat solo: a perfect fusion of
sophistication and down-to-the-bone meatiness. Even this slow piece hit
hard. And when that languid electric bass doom drops? It’s a full flooring
of the senses. What a band, what a great idea, what execution.
After the set I walked a few blocks to hear Uzeda perform at a nearby
cinema. I’d never seen them live before, but I listened aplenty back in my
university days in Chicago, where it felt like the entire city was
reoriented by the release of Shellac’s
At Action Parkin
1994. Uzeda—all the way home in Catania, Sicily—clearly had been too. As I
sank deeper into their set—jagged guitar, stop-start rhythmic mayhem,
unhinged and expressive vocals, and deep, dark bassness—the thoughts the
thoughts in memoria Albini went from a low hum to an overt admission. Uzeda
let me mourn and celebrate him in a way I hadn’t since he died.
A tear fell while I held my beer, nodded my head and cavorted in the back
like “Il Porno Star.” For a moment, I imagined Albini singing from the head
choir stall at the Certosa di Bologna, backed by intarsia that could’ve
easily been a Shellac image.
I wish they could’ve played AngelicA – it would’ve been a perfect fit for
their theater. The crowd at the cinema was overly dispersed and
semi-somnolent, aside from those of us dancing in the back; at Teatro San
Leonardo we could’ve packed the room and given Uzeda the reception they
deserved.
An update, while we’re on the subject of visionaries: Chris Cutler’s
Probes
series, which I mentioned in the last installment, is no longer being
supported by MACBA (though all the episodes are still online). He’s
recorded nine more—done and unreleased—and is at work on the next.
He needs a new sponsor: someone with educational or institutional footing,
so the series can remain free to the public and legally navigate the
copyright issues involved in playing back so much recorded work. So, where
my academic avant-gardists at? I know you’ve still got your revolutionary
charisma, “fighting the system from within” – well, here’s your moment!
Flex those connections. Hit me or Chris up and we can make it happen.
May 31, 2025
Centro di Ricerca Musicale/ Teatro San Leonardo – Bologna
Doppio Duo VasiPacorig ZavalloniZanisi
Vincenzo Vasi -vocals, theremin, drum
machine
Cristina Zavalloni - vocals
Giorgio Pacorig - piano, rhodes electric piano, korg MS20
synth, effects
Enrico Zanisi - piano
SENZA VOCE (dal dentista)
Quartet
El Mirar de la maja(E. Granados/F. Periquet)
Zavalloni/Zanisi
From Canti Polacchi op.74: Wiosna / Zyczenie (F. Chopin)
I Wonder as I Wander
(JJ Niles)
Quartet
Papà ha la bue(E. Pasador/C. Zavallone)
Vases/Pecoring
Non credo / Brutto (V. Vasi)
Mai ti dirò
(C. Villa) Kensington Gardens (L.
Reed/M. Monti) Moscow Discow ( Telex)
Quartet
Semo gente de borgata (F. Califano/M. Piacente) Tempesta (T.
Honsinger, E. Cavazzoni) Fenesta ca lucive (Neopolitan
traditional) Un corpo e un’anima (D.
Dattoli/U. Tozzi) Un homme et une femme (F.
Lai/P. Barouh) Something Stupid (C.C.
Parks)
 |
| Quartet. Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
It’s the finale. Onstage: one piano player, one keyboardist behind a small
arsenal of electronics and two performers seated with their backs to the
audience under spotlights. The latter rise, and a lo-fi opera begins.
Cabaret balladry, heavy theatrics and snapping. Serious snapping.
Flamenco-level, wrist-stinging, tempo-setting snapping. Korg blips added a
fine electronic shimmer to this otherwise heavily stylized. It ended on the
word passione, followed by some suggestive breathing. OK.
The second number launched a cycle of duets between Cristina Zavalloni’s
vocals and Enrico Zanisi’s piano. The style was operatic, theatrical and
frankly opaque to me. I didn’t understand the language. I didn’t understand
the idiom. I felt like I was smacking my head against a wall: I don’t know
this tradition – not its history, not its grammar, nor how it’s meant to
function. This was the farthest outside my domain I’d been all festival.
And, perhaps with a little irony, it came with music that many might find
the most accessible in the entire program. Excellent.
 |
| Zanisi and Zavalloni. Photo by Massimo Golfieri |
Maybe this is how most people feel when encountering the kind of music that
feels second nature to me. Though I’ll insist—and vociferously—that even
the most radical experimental music has a kind of built-in accessibility,
even for total newcomers. This set, however, seemed to require a certain
familiarity and fluency.
I can tell you one person who did get it: the guy two seats away
from me. He was chest-thumping, he was clapping in rhythm, he was pounding
his thigh with joy. He knew these tunes. He loved the snappy pastiche—the
quick cuts from standards to schmaltz to bubblegum pop. His delight was so
palpable that it pulled me in, slightly. It was really the musicianship
that ultimately convinced me. If I can’t have a blast while a guy adroitly
plays a multiphonic plastic kazoo to an extra-cheesified already-cheesy pop
tune – then that’s my problem.
I may have spent most of the set stupefied, but their version of “The Girl
from Ipanema”
got me. An ultra-slowed down arrangement featuring
only the chorus and interstitial scatting, it was exaggerated and warped
into something thrillingly unnerving.
I definitely didn’t ‘get’ this set the way their cover of Jobim got me. But
I’ve never been more thankful not to get something. It shoved me
far out of my musical comfort zone – and that’s a place I love to be.
Comfort, after all, has felt foreign ever since I was five years old, when
the other kindergartners called me “weird” and I said “thank you,” and
meant it, because it felt like having been seen. Places like AngelicA are
where we can go to feel comfortably uncomfortable, and that’s an important
kind of home.
Message to my mom: I do sometimes wish I’d given you grandkids. I know how
much you would’ve loved it. I think maybe I would’ve loved it too. But it
never felt possible, or feasible, for me. In exchange—because I also crave
that big-family feeling—I’ve ended up improvising one: an international
coterie of like-minded friends and collaborators, all in pursuit of genuine
cultural revolution. You’ve met some of them. You’re part of their family
too.
Impacchettarlo. I’ve got to give a shout-out to the sound crew for their
extreme flexibility in bringing each performer’s sound to life across this
wildly varied festival. And while I usually don’t care for visuals added to
music—unless they’re developed hand-in-hand with the material—I’ve got to
say, Gianluca’s light touch with the lighting effects really worked and
didn’t distract.
In the end, what matters about this festival is not just individual moments
but the totality of the full, unfiltered experience of living
musical culture presented with care, with guts and with no need to
specialize or sanitize. That’s how you respect an audience. You give them
everything, not just the trendiest slice. To paraphrase Bishop Robert
Barron, miracles are not interruptions of the natural order but
intensifications of it. AngelicA is just that: a miracle. Not because it
breaks the world, but because it deepens and intensifies it. It shows what
the world can be when music is for people, not marketed at them.
Even the chairs—yes, the chairs—are arranged in thoughtful staggered rows,
so your knees aren’t crunched and your ears and eyes aren’t blocked, even
with a full house. That, too, is part of the miracle: a space built for
listening.
And yet no national Italian paper covers it, nor any of the big
international outlets that ostensibly specialize in keeping the public
abreast of the most interesting developments in modern music and listening.
I’m not comparing AngelicA to the other festivals that attract the most
journalistic attention, where the crowd is divided into classes and
calibers, and artists are ranked by the font size of their name. I’m
saying: this is something else entirely.
Sometimes, walking the Bolognese streets for this month, I caught myself
strutting to Stelvio Cipriani’s suave synth groove from
La polizia è sconfitta
. That theme dances in your head, gets in your gait. And maybe that’s the
mood I’m chasing: a little defiant, a little dreamy. With moves like they
are meant.
Maybe at times it’s sounded like I’ve gone out of my way to critique some
things and champion others. Maybe it reads like I’m shouting from a varmint
hole. That’s fair. I am a varmint. To rewrite my favorite recurring line
from Avere vent’anni: I’m enthusiastic, it’s a fever under my
skin, and sometimes that gets me pissed off. (Noi siamo giovani, belle e
incazzate.)
Music is about people—not power. But even in the realm of experimental
music, power’s still hoarded. The same personalities keep the spotlight and
rarely share it. That’s why I highlight folks like Chris Cutler, Eve Risser
, Mariam Rezaei,Pat Thomas—artists whose second nature is
to lift others up.
As for me: I have no institutional authority. I don’t have a conservatory
background or professional title. I can’t tell an A from a C. I could only
tune a cowbell with a cobweb. My only authority is experience. Which, to
those sold on the clean lines of weaponized
professionalization—fellowships, awards, keywords and clout—probably sounds
icky and gross, suspect and maybe even aggressively defensive. But I also
have a stubborn sense of what matters, and I’m available. Even if that
means I stay hollering from the varmint hole, so be it. Varmints got ears.
And more importantly – they know a miracle when they hear one, which is
what AngelicA is. Not a platform for prestige; it’s too unsorted and
particular for that. It’s where music is made for people, and held like a
gift.
