Dario Calderone returns to the Contemporary Series with a new release Isolario. This time he presents 8 of his own compositions as duos with Tomas Järmyr, Neva Özgen, Barbara Ellison, Andy Moor, Kiay Tabassian, Gareth Davis, Deborah Walker and Botir Dosimbetov.

Isolario is released in the Contemporary Series on vinyl  and digital, mastered by Jos Smolders, and comes in beautiful artwork designed in line with the Contemporary Series by Rutger Zuydervelt with extensive notes and graphic scores by Dario Calderone. 

About Isolario

Isolario is a cycle of 9 duets, which can be performed, or just imagined, by any instrument or voice. The inspiration of these compositions comes from a compilation of texts by medieval writers from the “Arabic” world, describing a special and wonder-full island.

Beyond the fact that these islands really exist, what interests me is the description of the extraordinary, and how the “magical thinking” has shaped the imagination of the medieval navigators, creating recurrent spaces which survived until our contemporary culture. I chose texts that described a behaviour, or a sociological attitude, that could be transposed into a musical context. The scores consist in a textual part and in a visual part; the music resides in the clash between these 2 sorts of material.

The visual part of the scores consist of my versions of pre-existing maps from the medieval Arab and Persian tradition of KMMS. The use of these non-mimetic maps, was certainly not for navigation, as in the case of the modern ones, but they had an iconographic use: they could be defined as carto-ideographs. Therefore, these pictures can be seen not as descriptions of territories but rather as spaces, in a very similar way as graphic scores do not necessarily describe the final auditive result. My versions of these maps insert in the tradition of inexact copies of copies; nevertheless, they have been bonded to my musical necessities, and therefore transformed into musical graphic scores.

Dario Calderone has been supported for these compositions by the Fonds Podiumkunsten, the Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunsten, and SENA. 
For more information, and to see the full score, please visit dariocalderone.com/compositions

Dario Calderone: double bass, composition
Tomas Järmir: drums (on track 1)
Neva Özgen: kemençe (on track 2)
Barbara Ellison: electronics (on track 3)
Andy Moor: electric guitar (on track 4)
Kiya Tabassian: setar (on track 5)
Gareth Davis: bass clarinet and electronics (on track 6)
Deborah Walker: cello (on track 7)
Batir Dosimbetov: nay and electronics (on track 8)