Massimo Toniutti 'Shanghai Files' CD
£12.00
June 2025
First CD on Darren Tate's Fungal Editions label. A fine release housed in a beautiful 6-panel Ecopack. Mastered by Colin Potter.
Shanghai Files (6 or more ring-shaped films)
This is a new sound work whose origins date back to 2007. Initially conceived as an environmental piece, it consisted of six pre-recorded sequences of different lengths, each looping on its own speaker suspended from a large, centuries-old plane tree. The setting was the garden of a historic villa.
The original installation was titled "6 Pellicole ad anello" (6 Ring-Shaped Films), echoing loops and growth rings alike — ideally protective sound films.
In the unusual year of 2020, I dusted off those old audio files — including some alternate takes — and created a home-based quadraphonic version, which I eventually mixed down into a stereo snapshot of its ever shifting layers and shared through a month-long series of radio broadcasts.
This stereo adaptation took on a different name. I pictured the sound files like sticks from the game Shanghai: held in the hand, then released — falling into a chance pattern, a circle of sound shifting with each new drop. Hence, "Shanghai Files."
The new work began to take shape when Darren Tate asked me for a full-length work to inaugurate his newly founded label, Fungal Editions. I sent him an earlier version of what would become the main piece — he readily approved it as a fitting start to the project. That prompted me to revisit the material and expand it with two additional tracks.
The composition eventually found its final form — revu et corrigé, so to speak.
I actually had a second, much shorter track on hand — a sort of offshoot of S-Files. While the first leans more toward ambient, this one edges closer to the domain of radio art, with cut-ups and sonic manipulations that suggest a more radiophonic intent.
At that point, space had opened up for a further development — there was a need for a 3rd chemical bath. The title speaks for itself: a slow, metamorphic wash that alters, dilates, and reconfigures a chosen cluster of the ring-shaped films.
"Shanghai Files" partly draws on material from my documentary soundtrack work around 2007, when I would process sound to create specific backgrounds — or what I came to call “tints.”
The voice, originally recorded for those documentaries, by contrast, was later isolated and broken down into tiny, luminous fragments that subtly come to mark the main piece.
The release comes in a beautiful 6-panel Ecopack. Over the years, Darren has shared with me a number of nature photographs, which I’ve finally woven into a delicate visual montage. And our collaboration doesn’t end here…
To Gualtiero Toniutti
27.4.1961 – 31.5.2023
original recordings 2007
additional recordings, “partitura”, mix 2020-2024
Mastered by Colin Potter at IC Studio
Artwork by Massimo Toniutti based on Darren Tate’s photographs
Layout designed by Deison
This is a new sound work whose origins date back to 2007. Initially conceived as an environmental piece, it consisted of six pre-recorded sequences of different lengths, each looping on its own speaker suspended from a large, centuries-old plane tree. The setting was the garden of a historic villa.
The original installation was titled "6 Pellicole ad anello" (6 Ring-Shaped Films), echoing loops and growth rings alike — ideally protective sound films.
In the unusual year of 2020, I dusted off those old audio files — including some alternate takes — and created a home-based quadraphonic version, which I eventually mixed down into a stereo snapshot of its ever shifting layers and shared through a month-long series of radio broadcasts.
This stereo adaptation took on a different name. I pictured the sound files like sticks from the game Shanghai: held in the hand, then released — falling into a chance pattern, a circle of sound shifting with each new drop. Hence, "Shanghai Files."
The new work began to take shape when Darren Tate asked me for a full-length work to inaugurate his newly founded label, Fungal Editions. I sent him an earlier version of what would become the main piece — he readily approved it as a fitting start to the project. That prompted me to revisit the material and expand it with two additional tracks.
The composition eventually found its final form — revu et corrigé, so to speak.
I actually had a second, much shorter track on hand — a sort of offshoot of S-Files. While the first leans more toward ambient, this one edges closer to the domain of radio art, with cut-ups and sonic manipulations that suggest a more radiophonic intent.
At that point, space had opened up for a further development — there was a need for a 3rd chemical bath. The title speaks for itself: a slow, metamorphic wash that alters, dilates, and reconfigures a chosen cluster of the ring-shaped films.
"Shanghai Files" partly draws on material from my documentary soundtrack work around 2007, when I would process sound to create specific backgrounds — or what I came to call “tints.”
The voice, originally recorded for those documentaries, by contrast, was later isolated and broken down into tiny, luminous fragments that subtly come to mark the main piece.
The release comes in a beautiful 6-panel Ecopack. Over the years, Darren has shared with me a number of nature photographs, which I’ve finally woven into a delicate visual montage. And our collaboration doesn’t end here…
To Gualtiero Toniutti
27.4.1961 – 31.5.2023
original recordings 2007
additional recordings, “partitura”, mix 2020-2024
Mastered by Colin Potter at IC Studio
Artwork by Massimo Toniutti based on Darren Tate’s photographs
Layout designed by Deison
REVIEW by Frans De Waard, Vital Weekly : Perhaps I'm mistaken, but this might be the first time I've received a CD from Darren Tate. It's not a release with his music, which, if remembered well, was on different labels, but the start of his Fungal Editions as a label. A label, so I suppose, to release his work and not that of others, so much to my surprise, it's new music by Massimo Toniutti. I always thought Massimo was the slightly unknown Toniutti, but these days it seems he does more releases than his brother Giancarlo. On this new CD, he has three pieces, of which the first is the primary one. The genesis of these pieces is in a work he already composed in 2007. That was "an environmental piece, it consisted of six pre-recorded sequences of different lengths, each looping on its speaker suspended from a large, centuries-old plane tree. The setting was the garden of a historic villa." In 2020, when we had time to revisit the past, he dusted off the sounds in his archive and composed ever-changing patterns with them. On CD, he treats these sounds like the game Shanghai; "held in the hand, then released — falling into a chance pattern, a circle of sound shifting with each new drop. Hence, "Shanghai Files." I admit I don't play many games, so I have no idea what this is. The sound sources are diverse, including spoken and murmured voices, large drones, and small sounds, all of which are digitally manipulated. Much like Steve Roden's work, these sounds overlap in numerous ways, never forming the same configuration twice. Unlike Roden's work, Toniutti's music on '41 Ring-Shaped Films', as the central piece is called, isn't as ambient and follows a slightly more cut-up feeling, moving through vastly different landscapes.
'Spillikins (Radio Edit)' is the shortest of the three pieces and a more traditional song-like composition, employing musique concrète-like cut-up techniques within a shorter time frame. Still, I would think with much of the same sound material, it would turn out to be a neat little radio play. The CD ends with 'A 3rd Chemical Bath', in which all sounds blend in a more amorphous tonal poem. It's a natural resting point of the CD, an ambient coda, and it's not that the album needs such a coda. It's not what happens before that must result in a ten-minute long-form drone piece, but it's a fine piece nonetheless. An excellent inaugural release for this label.
