TuriAgostino

The pianist and electronic composer Turi Leng Seong Agostino (AUS/DE) puts his talents on full display in this stunning debut album ‘Self Portraits’. The record is a compilation of achingly raw self-referential soundscapes that span the course of a decade. Composed instinctually, scattered memories are pieced together and filtered into sonic atmospheres that unfold Agostino’s musical process.

Agostino’s training in classical piano opens a new vista for each song,  mediating his cultural touchpoints through its hammers and keys, allowing Agostino to find a means to express what cannot be verbalised. The tracks were composed and recorded in Brisbane, Kuala Lumpur, and Berlin through intersecting time periods and terrains. They are semi-improvisations structured around mesmerising chords played on different pianos which have undergone changes as new versions and retakes. Just like us, these songs have a history that has transformed over time.

Many of the songs were written and left incomplete for years, then revisited and re-worked with new recordings and found sounds that Agostino collected through this period. Each song’s linearity is obscured between looped synth samples, a low fi hip hop beat, and scattered, delayed sounds with strange time signatures. 

Elsewhere, Agostino launches us into fervent chapters of his inner world, stacking together Hungarian harmonised vocal layers, auto-tune and a single 808 to show the breadth of his influences. Sweeter reflections from his youth are glimpsed in softer tracks – where bird song meets piano solos that were recorded in his reverberant bedroom in Brisbane. The concrète technique blends mechanical white noise into an electronic sound bed that pulses the timeline through to the turmoiled soundscape of 2020. The dissonance and glissandos sway the sonic world as the awakening of a political consciousness takes root and falls into a vulnerable lament that one “has lost track of the world”. 

"Can You Hear The Birds?” offers a sweeter reflection of a younger Agostino; transporting us to the time when his piano microphones picked up the bird sounds that entered through his window whilst recording. He wrote the synth harmonies in the winter of 2013 during a family trip from Malaysia to Singapore, where the instrumental part was completed at the beginning of 2015 before moving to Berlin. Agostino’s close friend, vocalist William Kane-Potake, conveyed a message from the other side of the world with the profound vocal response to the song after hearing the instrumental version. Agostino’s Self Portraits captures the psychic course of a personal journey and the emotional landscapes that evolve and wisen inside us all.

A Portrait

In October 2022, Agostino and filmmaker Hannes Greve took a trip to Calabria, the tip of the boot at the southern edge of Italy. It is the place where his father was born. What emerged was A Portrait, a six-minute clip that presents Calabria in the words of its own people, interspersed with footage of the region, sights both beautiful and harsh and raw.

Agostino is a presence in the video, playing, producing, and most importantly, guiding the viewer through the stones and stories, but the spotlight is elsewhere – on the people of Calabria. Life isn’t easy in Calabria. Agriculture dominates the region’s economy, but the rocky, mountainous landscape means that dragging a living from the soil is anything but easy. Its levels of unemployment are among Europe’s highest, and many people leave (like Agostino’s family once did), and look for opportunities elsewhere. Despite that, Calabrians remain unbowed in the face of those struggles, proud of where they come from, and proud of themselves. That pride shines through A Portrait – soundtracked by the elegant shimmer of Agostino’s music, it depicts a place where even in the toughest times, the spirit of life breaks through. 

Agostino’s debut album Self Portraits is available now on all
streaming services.

Symmetry, the first single taken from Turi Agostino’s debut album Self Portraits is out now.

Can You Hear The Birds? transports us to the existential melodrama of the mid-twenties experience, and immortalises the bird sounds that were picked up by Agostino’s piano microphones whilst recording the song. He wrote the synth harmonies in the winter of 2013 during a family trip from Malaysia to Singapore, where the instrumental part was completed at the beginning of 2015 before moving to Berlin. Agostino’s close friend, Brisbane-based vocalist William Kane-Potake, conveyed a message from the other side of the world with the melancholic vocal response to the song that we hear today.

The single arrives accompanied with a mesmerising visual counterpart from director Hannes Greve. The video teases the sentimental nature of the track by showing a solemn navel-gazing protagonist played by Agostino apparently on a soul-searching vacation. He holds a piece of food that is devoured by a flock of birds which, in a few swoops, sabotages the self-indulgent moment to bring the protagonist back down to earth.  

 

 

Symmetry, the first single taken from Turi Agostino’s debut album

 

It’s accompanied with a video by Agostino’s close collaborator director Hannes Greve. The visual provides a surreal yet all-too-familiar snapshot of a beach vendor and sunbathers gathering together in a hazy summer scene. Perhaps it’s a distant memory of Agostino’s from the time in which he wrote Symmetry? Though we may never know, the image strikes somewhere between nostalgia and surrealism, grounding the album’s theme as a coming-of-age audio-visual portrait.

First emerging in 2010, Symmetry is the earliest song on the album. The track took its original form as an experimental noise collaboration between Agostino and his brother as a way to undo the ties binding him to the classical repertoire he’d learned from childhood. After moving to Berlin half a decade later, he re-worked it by stripping away the noise adding looped synth samples, a low fi hip hop beat, and delayed sounds with strange time signatures to arrive at the stunning version we hear today.

Self Portraits is a compilation of achingly raw self-referential soundscapes that span the course of a decade. Composed instinctually, scattered memories are pieced together and filtered into sonic atmospheres that unfold Agostino’s musical process over ten years. The tracks were composed and recorded in Brisbane, Kuala Lumpur, and Berlin through intersecting time periods and terrains. They are semi-improvisations structured around mesmerising chords played on different pianos which have undergone changes as new versions and retakes. The songs capture the psychic course of a personal journey and the emotional landscapes that evolve and wisen inside us all, over time.

Agostino’s forthcoming album Self Portraits, arrives on 11 November 2022 and is available to pre-order now.