Perceptually the Mountain is a source of pleasure, alterity and danger. Acoustically transparent.

Souffle (Fr: 'Breathe') is a film without images, conceived of and directed by Luca Garino - an Italian sound artist and composer, based in Turin.

Souffle offers scenes of attentive and mimetic presences in dialogue with other presences. Interior and exterior environments, and the various forms of life and/or non-life that inhabit them. They are integral assets to these scenes, and make up these other presences.

When an exterior environment meets an interior environment, one may only pass via permissible openings, analogous to the mouths and branchial derivations of Pilau, the giant Piraïba fish which lives in the Amazon river basin, to which the Wayãpi of the French Guiana dedicate a traditional dance, that must be sung in the course of a single day.

These openings are where information flows and interchanges from the other to the familiar; an ephemeral exchange which we can only experience through our single point of view: the human one, and only to the extent of what this perception can reveal.

An interior without openings will suffocate this vital flow; where information is held still, authoritarian thoughts will thrive, and inhabitants become occupants.

Perhaps the human bodies should therefore invert and spill out their minds and insides back to the earth - surrendering to entropy, and relinquishing all false dichotomies of separation: Subject / Object, Culture / Nature, Mind / Body, Human / Animal.

The environment and its ever-changing perspectives are the 'protagonists', within which living beings express themselves (all of them, indiscriminately, both in stillness and in movement).

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with the essential participation of:
Danilo Defacis
Aniello Maffettone
Matteo Martino
Andrea Penso
Cosimo Rosa
Lau (the dog)

The listener is advised that this work is without dynamic processing, and preserves the ratio between the different environments for their loudness as they were recorded. The dynamics will differ between sections, with some being of far greater loudness, and others much less. As such, the overall level is conservative so as to respect the peak of the loudest section. Listening in the dark is recommended.

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Recording notes
Sennheiser MKH 20 (AB stereo), Microtech gefell M950 x2 (closeups)
RFZ V781 (2ch), Sonosax SX-R4+

Recorded by Adam Asnan in Chiara (940 m) upper valley (Traversella, Piedmont, Italy), October 2019.
Special thanks to Andrea Penso for his warm hospitality and generousity.
Special thanks to Jean-Michel Beaudet for his anthropological research and documentation collected in the last 50 years, without which, the inspiration for this work would not exist.