A guest, a record, about forty people sitting in silence. It's all here, at least apparently.
Club Recordo was born at the end of May 2023 from the will of Alessia Marzin and Elisa Montagner, who were joined by Lorenzo Del Sal and Umberto Iannelli and, later Giulia Callino and Silvia Camerin, with the intention of redefining the collective musical experience. The push comes from a listening club in Tübingen, which Elisa participates in during a period in Germany. Back in Veneto, the lack of such a situation is evident: «There was a lack of a situation where there were no judgements, where we could simply sit and listen together», she says. They are especially lacking outside the large centres, in an area where the evening cultural offering tends to coincide with an aperitif and little else. The chosen base is Villa Filanda Antonini, an artist's residence founded by Giulio Feltrin – a nineteenth-century spinning mill in Villorba, province of Treviso – who believed in the project from the beginning.
The main format is called Sound Shipwreck: a cognitive shipwreck in sound. The invited guest – so far musicians, journalists, video makers, researchers – presents a record to which he is deeply attached, not necessarily his; an album that somehow marked his biography. Then the complete listening begins, side A and side B, with a break in the middle. At the end of the album, a moment of open discussion. No genre limits: in past editions we have moved from author soundtracks to Metallica albums, from The Cure to ambient. It is precisely that plurality that interests the collective, a way to show how each of us listens to music differently.
Listening takes place on vinyl, but it's not a fetish, or at least not only. «The fact of taking the record, putting the needle in, is a completely different narrative compared to putting on a CD or listening to streaming», says Elisa. On streaming platforms, music is consumed in fragments, driven by algorithms: Sound Shipwreck proposes the opposite. Immersion. And to do this the setting must be ideal: the ceiling is set at 45 people, above that threshold intimacy tends to be lost.
Sitting in silence for an hour listening to music with strangers is not something we are used to, and Club Recordo knows it. The initial presentation also serves this purpose: to prepare the audience for immersion, to give narrative and personal points that make listening more intriguing. The same logic is found in the Decalogue 10 Steps to Map Your Listening – inspired by the work of American composer Pauline Oliveros theorist of deep listening – distributed at each event: ten micro-exercises to make listening more attentive, from before the evening to after. Suggestions include: drinking water, locating the source of the sound in the environment, asking others what they heard. The price of the ticket also has its weight. Not fixed, but divided into three bands, with a small description of the value next to each: a self-responsibility system that allows the user to decide how much to give. Each meeting also feeds an archive on Are.na where the guests' written comments after each evening converge: short reflections, often very personal.
Club Recordo, however, is not alone Sound Shipwreck. The collective organizes talks – the last one, “Architects of Sounds”, discussed what it means to build a musical infrastructure in Italy and be a woman in doing so – collaborating with very different realities, both local and international. The next one on the calendar, “Mapping Communities: narrating and inhabiting the territory through culture”, will be held in a private house in Ponzano Veneto in partnership with Please Listen, followed by a series of DJ sets.
On May 21st Club Recordo closes the 2025/2026 season with Gigi Masin, Venetian composer, central figure of Italian ambient, author of the iconic Wind of 1986 and close to the publication of Movement for Sacred Bones. Masin will present an album of his choice, revealed only on the evening of the event. It's worth the trip.
