Fresh on the heels of his beautiful solo disc for Fluid-Audio (Four Steps on Point, a stunning suite of compositions drawing on field-recordings and violin reflecting on a painful recovery from a spinal hernia on the eve of his wedding night) Old Bicycle and Grey Sparkle present Batalha, a collaboration with the Portuguese turntablish and laptop musician Nuno Moita. Moita sent Uggeri recordings made from various analog sources, electronic pulses and crackles. Italian field-recordist and soundscape master that he is, Uggeri re-worked that material with a variety of field-recordings.
Batalha means battle in Portuguese, in this case referring to the battle between nature and machine. Of course the relationship between man and nature and man and machine has been the impetus of a great many works, but Moita and Uggeri play with form here a bit. Our understanding of Nature is a relatively recent construction, emerging along with Industrialization as it’s other. Here natural sounds are cast as provoking anxiety, where as the mechanical sources are soothing and bring relief from the stress of the former. Barking dogs and buzzing insects, irregularly lapping water and other natural sounds remind us of the ways in which our image of the peacefulness of nature is often willful idyllic fantasy.