Milan-based composer and musician Attila Faravelli specializes in electroacoustic music and has released records for some of the most interesting Italian labels of the past few years (Die Schachtel, Boring Machines and Presto!?). Since 2010, Faravelli has acted as promoter for one of the most exciting gig series in town: The Lift, which he hosts in his small but acoustically high-performing recording studio in northern Milan. For a very limited audience—rarely exceeding ten or fifteen people, given the dimensions of the location—the series delivers intimate and engaging performances from cutting-edge international musicians such as Canadian sound artist Mark Templeton, Andy Guhl of the now-defunt Swiss cult duo Voice Crack or the “computer music for hooligans” project EVOL. It was during a set from the double bass player Matija Schellander that Faravelli started considering the possibility of recording a music generated by a complex interaction with its physical space, building a game-play with the room’s acoustics. This was the starting point for creating the Freie Aerophone, a limited-edition sound-making device inspired by the piercing bass tones of the Austrian composer and improviser. Each Freie Aerophone has to be built and manipulated by the user to create similar low-register sounds for another physical space. (Francesco Tenaglia)