BIO: IRA is an artistic duo formed in 2023 and composed of guitarist Mathilde Court [1996 - CH] and electronic composer Danilo Gervasoni [1987 – IT]. Mathilde Court plays contemporary music while simultaneously exploring various facets of the artistic world: she participates in experimental music performances, interprets pieces by contemporary composers, and writes electronic music. Danilo Gervasoni comes from punk-hardcore environments and has been involved in live electronics, producing, and classical-contemporary composition for years. He works through the use of digital technologies with the aim of exploring the relational aspects related to music and art. IRA was born from the desire to unite these two backgrounds to create a multidisciplinary artistic project that uses electronic music as its privileged medium.

It takes the form of contemporary music, sound installations, DJ sets and collaborations with other artistic fields (cinema, writing, etc).

RUSE is a collective performance environment for participatory live-electronics. The audience is given an active role in compositional choices (form, development, timbres, etc.) in a creative peer-to-peer approach with an electronic musician. 

During the performance, participants have the opportunity to interact in real time with the musical material in order to modify certain characteristics. The interaction is made possible thanks to a web application specially developed for the RUSE project that the audience can access via any device. 

The data is sent to a server from the different devices and then collected, reordered and transmitted to the electronic performer's software, managing different synthesis parameters. This process is repeated several times during the performance. 

In RUSE, the musician loses his authoritarian status in a perspective of distributed creativity, investing the audience in an active role and empowering them with the aim of achieving a collective aesthetic result.

Performed at ARS ELECTRONICA GARDENS 2021 - Lugano CH

Official Web Page

"Il clown nell'umiliazione si eleva" (the clown in humiliation elevates himself) is a quote from Leo Bassi, one of the most famous italian clown.

Clowns are philosophically extremely interesting figures: they live in failure with acceptance and resignation. Clowns do what their nature leads them to be: tragicomic figures. Being humiliated is their very nature, stuck in their role with no possibility of change.

• Selected in the contest 'Banc d'essai' by INA-GRM

• Performed at the MPAA Saint-Germain Theatre on 20 Oct 2019 - Paris FR (YouTube)

Sigmund Freud uses the charioteer as a metaphor to explain the relationship between ego and es. The piece is placed within the Freudian allegory by simulating the chariot race, intimately divided between rigidity and freedom, where the different elements contrast or overlap until they almost merge.

Performed: 

• Piano City Milano 2022 - Milano IT(YouTube, YouTube)

• Culture and Health 2022 - Lugano CH (YouTube) 

The piece is inspired by Michelangelo Antonioni's film in which the main character Giuliana (Monica Vitti), is a woman experiencing deep depression and a constant sense of inadequacy due to the alienation of a modernity devoid of authentic meaning. The narrative unfolds between a hostile nature with desolate beaches and an industrial world of houses, shacks and huge industrial ships, intertwined in Carlo Di Palma's photography.

The track retraces these feelings. It is a sound world that is never too hostile but never too welcoming either.

Two types of processes were used to create the sounds: magnetic field sampling and a Max/MSP patch based on fractal algorithm known as 'Lévy's flight'.

'They talk to me' is a track about incommunicability. The listener finds himself immersed in an indecipherable sound environment where it is difficult to find references to hold on to. This feeling is then lost in nostalgic litanies, a gentle lulling in solitude.

Eleven voice messages received on WhatsApp were used and converted into notes, gestures and dynamics according to their own spectral components. Subsequently, each of these was adapted and 'cleaned up' for each of the instruments in the ensemble.

Instrumental ensemble:

• Flute

• Oboe

• Clarinet (Bb)

• Bassoon

• Horn (F)

• Trumpet (C)

• Trombone

• Piano

• Violin I

• Violin II

• Viola

• Cello

• Double bass

YouTube

In this piece, the intention is to recreate a sense of deluded waiting, through the construction of stasis and brief climaxes that lead to new situations of waiting. An eternal presentation of the present, a redundant suspension hiding behind the mask of the future. 

This expectation is expressed by the alternation of musical and theatrical parts, in which the musicians are asked to recreate gestures that recall the sense of boredom and impatience that lead to distraction. In these playful interludes emerges an attempt to explore this feeling through different languages in which sound continuously loses and regains its central role within a concert context.

Instrumental ensemble:

• Flute

• Clarinet (Bb)

• Piano

• Violin

• Cello

YouTube

A guided improvisation using algorithms with timbre synthesis techniques related to 'Lévy's flight' fractal.