Today's Special [LP]

Hanne Lippard & Renato Grieco - Today's Special [LP]

Hanne Lippard and Renato Grieco's Today's Special is a suite of language works synthesising melody and diction that integrates the literary and the audible in a repertoire of songs that bask in the melody of voice and the punctuations of structured composition. Working with methods of reduction rather than opulence in both tonal composition and rhetoric, each piece pegs the poetic to the musical with compositional schematics and methods. There is little to no improvisation here; instead, the duo set up matrices, rules and structural links that facilitate a meaningful locus of exchange between their two practices.

Lippard's texts are a collection of new and previously completed works, and as is typical for her, she enjoys the easy pleasure of wordplay, iterative language and decontextualised anecdote. Grieco's instrumentation works with her language art as a form of acoustic typography. His main instrument is the viola da gamba, the instrument considered closest to the human voice for its tonal range and ability to mimic inflection and timbre, and here he brings it even closer to the voice, building systems by which it moves with and around Lippard. He also plays piano and Wurlitzer, and joins her in speaking on Receiver and in conversation on the final track, The Black Rose.

Today's Special was developed in person over a series of small residencies at Deutsche Akademie Rom Villa Massimo in Rome, Fondazione Morra in Napoli and Callie's in Berlin. Following performances at leading contemporary art venues including Art Genève, Centro per l'arte contemporanea Luigi Pecci and Museo Madre, the record captures the duo's distinctive live collaboration.

Tracks
1 Portrait Of A Betrayal (3:48)
2 Aficionado (2:04)
3 Page Sixty One (0:52)
4 Possible Side Effects (1:10)
5 How To Clean Feet (0:52)
6 Labradorable (3:47)
7 Hurtbeat (3:03)
8 Receiver (3:51)
9 Traditional Colours Of France I (3:31)
10 A Story About Being Blue (5:21)
11 Traditional Colours Of France II (2:52)
12 The Black Rose (1:50)