Rinus van Alebeek and Michal Libera set out for a dozen of excursions into Calabrian towns armed with Italo Calvino's 'Invisible Cities' as a guide book, to recite, talk, read, listen, drink coffee, perform, play, record, play back... or: blow, bow, rub, explode, scrape, walk, ignore, talk, screw, dance, whistle, which are all suggestions of Alvin Lucier to make large and small resonant environments sound. The material recorded during these attempts to make invisible cities of Calabria sound was then composed by Rinus van Alebeek to form a road-audio-book.
The whole idea came from reading Italo Calvino's „Invisible Cities” while travelling among unknown cities of Calabria. The similarities have been striking. The book became a guide, Kublai Khan – an emperor of the land in the south of Italy and the idea – irrepresible urge to actually perform this similiarity. The original text by Calvino was overwritten with some information – including the names of towns – distorted, filtered and overdubbed by its local reflections. Armed with it, Rinus van Alebeek and Michal‚ Libera set out for a dozen of excursions into Calabrian towns to recite, talk, read, listen, drink coffee, perform, play, record, play back... or: blow, bow, rub, explode, scrape, walk, ignore, talk, screw, dance, whistle, which are all suggestions of Alvin Lucier to make large and small resonant environments sound. The material recorded during these attempts to make invisible cities of Calabria sound was then composed by Rinus van Alebeek to form a road-audio-book.