The static, non-expressive and impersonal use of some instruments, flute and clarinet in particular, are the musical means to ask oneself about the need to act or not, to stop the flowing of time.

As in Dust, which opens the album, there’s a need and an inevitable influence on the timbre choices, Strings completely rethinks the use of the piano, prepared and transformed into something else. The result is a hybrid between a harp and a banjo, a new timbre that does not bend to the acoustic and symbolic will of an arpeggiated romantic accompaniment, but rather invites regression, drawing the listener’s attention to childish, massive, non-clearly defined and unsafe gestures. In Stones, musical means are used to state that sometimes things happen independently of our will: it’s the mathematical inversion of Dust, and, even if it has an almost opposite aesthetic, it exists because its opposite exists. 

Stones is the preamble, and the prequel to Trees, the longest piece, the formal synthesis of the entire album, where extremes are revealed and roles are disrupted: the accompaniment of the bass, which sings, sunny and catchy in its fundamental, it suddenly becomes a “theme of lament”, that switches to strings elaborating it into a long grueling aggravation.

The essence of the whole work is contained in this passage, the clear break and the thematic shift create that imaginary line, which is the essence of dualism and its prerequisite, which opposes life to death.

It is a long dedication to Federico, who fought against the disease for endless long years fighting it to the End. Here the string orchestra resists until every instrument from the acute to the low end has notes on the keyboard to be played, or a faint voice to speak, after which, in turn and in “silence”, they leave.