From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme begins in the unstable territory between recognition and uncertainty. Voices appear close enough to suggest ordinary human presence, but their circumstances remain unclear. A room can be heard without being pictured. Objects scrape, resonate, or shift their weight. Tapes introduce sounds whose original moment has already passed, while field recordings open onto spaces that may be public, domestic, rural, mechanical, or entirely reconstructed. Ezio Piermattei does not arrange these materials into a conventional documentary, nor does he dissolve them into an anonymous electroacoustic texture. He allows each fragment to retain some of its former life while placing it inside a new and deliberately unreliable narrative. The result resembles a travel diary written after the journey has become confused with dreams, jokes, overheard remarks, physical discomfort, and memories belonging to someone else.
The title provides a clue to this method. An oriflamme was a sacred royal banner associated with medieval France, carried into battle as a sign of authority and total commitment. From a distance, however, almost anything vertical, bright, torn, or moving in the wind might resemble one. Piermattei’s phrase emphasizes the problem of perception before the object itself. Something appears meaningful because it is far away. Distance creates grandeur, pattern, and symbolic order. Approach closely and the banner may become laundry, plastic, smoke, vegetation, reflected light, or a damaged object trembling on a wire. The album repeatedly stages this collapse between impressive appearance and inconvenient material reality. From afar, its sounds suggest ceremonies, journeys, landscapes, and elaborate dramatic scenes. Up close, they reveal breath, tape hiss, small impacts, ordinary speech, malfunctioning equipment, and the unruly friction of bodies occupying space.
The release consists of two long compositions, “Something Tawny Above the Plaster” and “A Little Rigor,” each lasting around sixteen and a half minutes. Their cassette-side proportions matter. Rather than presenting a collection of discrete miniatures, Piermattei gives each piece enough time to accumulate an internal geography. Sounds arrive, disappear, and return after their context has shifted. A voice heard early in a piece may later seem connected to an object or environment that was initially unrelated. The listener begins drawing lines among fragments, producing narrative through proximity even when no explicit story has been supplied. This is one of the album’s quiet pleasures: it turns interpretation into an involuntary form of composition.
“Something Tawny Above the Plaster” has the title of a remembered visual detail whose importance cannot be established. Tawny may describe fur, stain, fabric, old paint, animal coloration, dried vegetation, or light falling across a damaged wall. “Above the plaster” suggests architecture, repair, concealment, or something discovered where the surface has failed. The phrase feels extracted from a larger conversation whose surrounding sentences have been lost. Piermattei’s sound world behaves similarly. It contains evidence without a complete incident, clues without a crime, and descriptive precision attached to an absent object.
The opening movement establishes a close, inhabited acoustic space. Speech and environmental noise coexist without one being reduced to background for the other. Piermattei has an unusual ear for the social life of apparently insignificant sound. A voice is not valuable only for the information contained in its words. It also reveals distance from the microphone, posture, hesitation, attention, the acoustics of the room, and the speaker’s relation to whoever else may be present. A pause can expose embarrassment or uncertainty. A laugh can open a temporary community and then disappear. Even unintelligible language carries rhythm, regional character, and bodily pressure.
This sensitivity separates the album from field recording that treats the world primarily as a source of beautiful textures. Piermattei is not collecting immaculate ambiences. His recordings contain interference, awkward proximity, interruption, and human mess. The microphone does not hover invisibly above the scene. Its presence can be felt in the way certain sounds become too close, too warm, or too detailed. The recording apparatus participates in the event, creating its own social pressure. People may speak differently because a device is present, while ordinary activities become performances simply because they have been preserved.
Piermattei assembles these traces through montage, but his edits rarely behave like dramatic cinema cuts. They are less concerned with advancing a plot than with changing the meaning of what has already been heard. A domestic sound may suddenly acquire menace after being placed beside a low mechanical vibration. A burst of outdoor activity can make a preceding interior seem claustrophobic. A fragile instrumental phrase may briefly sentimentalize a voice before another object sound breaks the spell. The composition continually produces interpretations and then withdraws the evidence supporting them.
Humor is crucial to this instability. Experimental sound collage can easily become oppressively serious, as though every tape hiss and metallic scrape must announce a crisis in perception. Piermattei allows the absurdity of recorded life to remain present. Speech fragments can sound pompous, confused, practical, or unexpectedly theatrical. Small noises arrive with comic timing. A transition may resemble a solemn revelation before revealing itself to be built from something embarrassingly ordinary. The humor is not placed above the materials as commentary. It arises from the mismatch between the scale of our interpretations and the humble sources being interpreted.
That mismatch returns to the image of the oriflamme. Human beings continually convert distance into meaning. A faraway shape becomes a banner, an overheard phrase becomes a confession, an accidental rhythm becomes intention, and an old recording becomes evidence of a coherent past. Piermattei neither mocks nor fully trusts this impulse. His work depends upon it. Without the listener’s desire to connect fragments, the album would remain a sequence of sounds. Yet every connection is made provisional by the next interruption.
The use of tape deepens this uncertainty because tape is never only a neutral storage medium. It carries time physically. Hiss, compression, distortion, speed variation, and uneven frequency response remind us that the recorded event has travelled through material before reaching the present. The sound may have been copied, replayed into a room, recorded again, or altered through handling. What we hear is not simply “what happened” but what survived a chain of machines and decisions. Tape becomes a kind of weather passing across memory.
Piermattei appears drawn to the way recording can make the mundane mysterious without requiring supernatural subject matter. A poorly preserved voice resembles a message from another world because its source has become unreachable. An ordinary room tone acquires emotional force when removed from the room that produced it. A minor physical action, isolated and amplified, can sound ceremonial. The album repeatedly asks how little alteration is needed before everyday reality begins behaving like fiction.
“A Little Rigor” introduces its own ambiguity through the word “rigor.” It may mean strictness, accuracy, stiffness, severity, or the physical condition of a body after death. The diminutive phrase makes the word stranger. A little rigor might describe modest discipline applied to unruly material, a temporary hardening, a touch of formality, or the first sign that something living has ceased to move freely. The composition balances all of these possibilities. It is carefully structured without becoming rigid, while several passages seem fascinated by objects and voices caught between animation and stillness.
The second side feels less like a continuation of the first than another attempt to organize the same unstable universe. Its fragments often appear more compressed, with shifts in texture producing an increased sense of psychological enclosure. Yet Piermattei continues to resist sustained darkness. Moments of delicacy appear inside the congestion, and comic or conversational elements prevent the work from becoming a sealed nightmare. The atmosphere continually changes because human presence refuses to remain symbolic. People cough, speak, misunderstand, occupy rooms, and make practical noise.
Objects possess an equally unstable status. An object can be heard as itself, as an instrument, or as a character within the narrative. Bells, surfaces, containers, mechanisms, and resonant materials do not simply decorate the field recordings. Their sounds often redirect attention away from speech and toward the physical world surrounding it. A human voice may suggest interior thought, but an object insists upon friction, gravity, and contact. It reminds us that every narrative is taking place among things that do not care how they are interpreted.
This produces a productive conflict between story and matter. The listener wants to know who is speaking, where the recording occurred, and what relation one fragment has to another. Meanwhile the objects continue striking, humming, rattling, or occupying acoustic space without answering. Piermattei’s work does not eliminate narrative. It places narrative beside materials that resist becoming subordinate to it.
The instrumental sounds operate in a similar way. They rarely develop into stable melodies or announce themselves as performances separated from the surrounding environment. Instead, musical gestures drift into the collage and become difficult to distinguish from found sound. A tone may have been played intentionally, produced accidentally by an object, or recovered from another recording. That uncertainty erodes the usual border between composition and documentation. Piermattei composes with recordings, but the recorded world already contains countless unclaimed compositions.
This is where the album’s cinematic quality becomes most apparent. It does not sound like the soundtrack to an existing film. It behaves like cinema after the images have been removed, leaving only location sound, dialogue, Foley effects, musical fragments, cuts, and changes in acoustic perspective. The listener supplies the missing screen. Yet because the sounds do not belong to one visible world, the resulting film continually mutates. A room becomes a road, a voice becomes memory, and a small object becomes an enormous machine simply because no image remains to correct the scale.
The absence of images also changes how intimacy operates. Close-miked sound can feel invasive because there is no visual context explaining why the listener has been permitted so near. Breath, mouth sounds, handling noise, and room resonance create what might be called over-closeness: a proximity that does not necessarily produce understanding. We may hear the surface of an event with extraordinary detail while remaining completely ignorant of its purpose. The album understands that access and knowledge are not the same thing.
This principle has larger implications for the way recorded life is consumed. Modern listeners are surrounded by voices, videos, messages, surveillance, archives, and fragments of other people’s private environments. Distance has collapsed technologically, yet understanding has not increased at the same rate. Piermattei’s work stages that contradiction without converting it into a lecture. His recordings place us almost inside other spaces while denying the contextual information that would allow confident interpretation.
The limited cassette edition is especially appropriate because the medium turns the two compositions into physical sides that must be traversed in order. Cassette listening contains a small but meaningful delay between sides, an interruption requiring the listener to handle the object and reverse its direction. That action fits an album concerned with perspective, surfaces, and the physical transmission of memory. The tape is not merely a container. It introduces its own duration, noise, and vulnerability.
More mars team’s edition also belongs to an international network of small experimental labels through which intensely personal work can travel without becoming standardized. Piermattei’s recordings emerge from Italian environments and sensibilities, but the cassette was issued by a Greek label and mastered by Moras Marios. The object crossed borders while carrying voices and spaces whose exact locations may remain hidden from the listener. This circulation adds another layer of distance to the title. By the time the sounds arrive, they already resemble a banner glimpsed from another territory.
Piermattei’s earlier aliases and his Tutore Burlato label reveal a broader practice concerned with unstable authorship, collage, curation, and the comic potential of experimental culture. Releasing under his own name does not make From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme straightforward autobiography. The “self” present here is distributed across field recordings, other voices, machines, found materials, and editorial decisions. Piermattei is less the central character than the person arranging traffic among characters who may not know they have entered the same work.
That role demands an unusual form of restraint. A less attentive composer might overload the pieces with dramatic processing, making sure every fragment announced its importance. Piermattei often lets sounds remain small. Their relationships create force. A modest noise heard after a voice can become emotionally charged without being enlarged. A pause can perform more work than an added drone. The compositions feel dense because many forms of attention are operating simultaneously, not because every moment is filled with maximum volume.
The album therefore rewards repeated listening without presenting itself as a puzzle with one correct solution. Familiarity does not reveal a hidden linear narrative. It changes which details rise to the foreground. On one pass, a listener may follow the speech and experience the object sounds as interruption. On another, the objects become the central characters and the voices seem incidental. A later listen may concentrate on transitions, tape texture, spatial depth, or the strange emotional effect of fragments whose meanings remain unavailable.
From Afar It Looks Like an Oriflamme ultimately treats listening as an act of uncertain recognition. We hear patterns because we need patterns, but reality keeps leaking around their edges. A sound resembles music until a voice makes it environmental. A conversation resembles documentary evidence until an edit turns it into fiction. An object resembles a symbol until it falls, scrapes, or reveals its ordinary weight.
The title’s distant banner never fully resolves. Perhaps it really is an oriflamme. Perhaps the grandeur is accurate, and the humble materials truly do assemble into a signal worth following. Piermattei leaves that possibility alive. His humor does not cancel wonder, and his attention to physical detail does not reduce imagination to error. Instead, the album suggests that mistaken perception may be one of imagination’s essential tools. We see a banner where there may only be cloth, but the vision changes how we cross the landscape.
These two compositions are built from exactly that change. Voice, tape, objects, rooms, instruments, and environmental debris remain stubbornly themselves while also becoming entrances into a larger and unstable world. From nearby they are scraps, surfaces, heat, and noise. From afar they gather, lift in the wind, and briefly resemble a sign.
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