DUSTED MAGAZINE

Dusted Reviews

Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget - Low Tide Digitals II

today features
reviews charts
labels writers
info donate

Search by Artist



Sign up here to receive weekly updates from Dusted


email address

Recent Reviews

Dusted Reviews


Artist: Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget

Album: Low Tide Digitals II

Label: Rune Grammofon

Review date: Sep. 11, 2005


Reenacting a Big Bang of sorts, Archetti and Wiget’s second installment of Low Tide Digitals begins with a series of cello tones being sucked backward into the field of a celestial drone. From this prelude emerges a series of interlocking barren spaces – if not really a bang, at least a dispersal of sound across a constantly expanding universe.

The listener moves through this universe without the aid of a shuttle. In fact, the journey is more akin to driving a golf cart down the highway in order to catch the distinct quality of every foot of paved ground. Archetti and Wiget are trustworthy chauffeurs. Currently based in Switzerland, Archetti is a guitarist and multimedia artist best known for his involvement with Guru Guru in the 1970s, while Wiget is a cellist who has worked with a number of renowned jazz and electronic improvisers over the last decade.

On the surface, LTDII is fairly simple, consisting mainly of cello and guitar processed by a computer, augmented by carefully deployed synthetic sounds. For much of the record little is happening – a spacious emptiness predominates. Archetti and Wiget take full advantage of the stark canvas. On “Stück 14,” a dim low-end tone emerges periodically, skewered by the flittering high-end tones of a disemboweled bagpipe. Silence interjects for a few moments only to be overtaken by a glimmer of distorted guitar arpeggios that inch forward like cracked sirens. On the second piece, “Stück 13,” the swooning of a pitch-shifted cello is enough to initiate a memorable drama. The sounds are at once captivating and elusive, graven images flashing intermittently across every surface of a blackened theater.

Like Brian Eno’s Apollo, a soundtrack to visuals of NASA’s missions to the moon of the same name, LTDII maps a remarkable environment. But unlike Eno’s work, which tends to proffer spaces stretching into infinity without discernible differentiation – a road we can all follow forever – Archetti and Wiget mark each passing moment with sounds that are as singular and diverse as the landscape of the moon itself, while maintaining that lunar hue.

Rather than a soundtrack for a collective (national) dream, LTDII is procession of sound images, the half-formed recollections of events that shape our own landscape, as well as the belated imagining of them: precisely deployed hums and hisses, ghostly radio frequencies and elegiac organ chords blur the line between the moon landing and its subsequent TV memory, while pristine low-frequency cannonballs and distended masses of dirty electric guitar further roil the slideshow.

By Alexander Provan

Read More

View all articles by Alexander Provan

Find out more about Rune Grammofon

©2002-2011 Dusted Magazine. All Rights Reserved.