Alos works her pagan-doom-avant-metal magic with her ominous and spellbinding single and video Embrace The Darkness — showcasing today on Tinnitist.
The title track from her upcoming album, Embrace The Darkness finds the Italian muse of chaos guiding you through unexplored musical and spiritual realms on the volcanic Italian island of Stromboli. Alos utilizes vocals, modular synthesizers, artistic glass objects, bells and volcanic stones to craft the experimental eight-minute soundscape of transcendence and healing.
Arriving 20 years after her apparition as artistic identity, Embrace The Darkness is her most intimate and complex project. Since the beginning, Alos — aka Stefania Pedretti, co-founder of the noise duo OvO with Bruno Dorella, creator of the Allun collective with Natalia Saurin, and partner in collaborations with Kawabata Makoto, Alan Dubin, Colin H. van Eeckhout, Xabier Iriondo and Baby Dee — has been active in the interstitial space between underground culture and contemporary arts.
Over the years, her performances have enriched the most avant-garde sides of the cultural scene of Milan, Berlin, Bruxelles, Paris, Shenzhen, New York and other cities. During 2021, Pedretti went through her own darkness, struggling with serious illness and a hard physical rehabilitation to recover her lost voice. Six months after a long hospitalization, the idea of elaborating the experience with a performance was born. The volcano emerged as the chosen symbolic system to create a synthesis and a narration before and beyond the human, tracing a path that could lead from darkness to light. In June 2022, the invitation by the dance festival Marosi in Stromboli promptly enabled the incubation of the new vision on the slopes of the most active Italian volcano, and the development of a practice-based artistic research that was also a healing journey.
Embrace The Darkness is a new land emerging from the collision of matter, a fertile and overwhelming experience for all its participants, audience included. One year after the residency, having already presented the ritual on several occasions, Alos has further expanded the research into an edition that combines sound, visuals, and texts, and consists of a 12-inch vinyl record and of an artist’s book. Printed in 300 copies, it’s co-produced by three independent realities that got together for the very first time: The labels Dio Drone and Archaeological Records, and the German publisher Occulto. While the primary experience is the performance itself, where Alos acts in an immersive space created by the video shot on location during the recordings, the narration of the experience lives and grows further in the edition.
All sounds in the record, both acoustic or electronic, were registered live by Marcello Batelli in various, mainly natural locations on Stromboli like Sciara del Fuoco and the cave of Aeolus. Batelli’s work with sound donates outstanding depth and life to the first claustrophobic, then liberatory atmospheres created by Alos’ on-site performance. The artist’s book is the visual counterpart of the record, featuring photos and videostills shot by Giulio Di Mauro, who directed of the title track’s video under the binding sun of Stromboli.
Alos has been a musician, performer and artist active since 1998. With her bands, she has played more than 1,000 concerts in Europe, the U.S., Canada, Russia, China and Vietnam. Her sound transcends the borders between performance art by integrating experimental music, performance, improvisation, figurative art, installations and video art with the objective of actively involving the audience in a performance capable of creating a strong sensorial experience.
Embrace The Darkness will be released on Nov. 25, the 680th anniversary of a tsunami caused by a volcanic eruption in Stromboli in 1343. Watch the video for the song above, hear more from Alos below, and venture into her realm on her website, Facebook and Instagram.
