Isambard Khroustaliov and Maurizio Ravalico started their collaboration in May 2006, with a three-day recording session documented on their first album ‘Five Loose Plans’. A second live album ‘The Resurfacing of an Atavistic Trait’ followed in 2011 before the duo teamed up with Rudi Fischerlehner to form Fiium Shaarrk alongside other projects and solo releases. During the intervening years, Maurizio and Isambard have continued to work together and a new duo release is planned for 2027, alongside the reissue of their two first albums in 2026, to mark the 20 years since the start of their collaboration.
Their duo takes advantage of acoustic sound at its richest and most varied in terms of timbral expression, with Maurizio’s set-up expanding the palette of percussion sound from a selection of conventional instruments (two surdos, Tibetan bowls and cymbals) into the open-ended realm of found objects, employing various kitchen utensils, marbles, film tapes, magnolia leaves, and different components from industrial machinery.
Isambard’s sound construction runs in parallel to this real-world scenario; he picks up the sound created by the acoustic instruments, analyses and processes it in real time (using a series of hand crafted software tools) and plays it back to Maurizio as a mode of conversation, creating a structural dialogue between two vastly different worlds, one continuous by its very nature and the other a discreet manipulation of this reality.
The duo’s approach to the music itself is therefore predominantly concrete, in that the two performers work at generating one single and undivided sound output. No one is accompanying anybody else; both performers occupy the same sound zone, and are, under all perspectives, playing one single four handed meta-instrument.
Isambard and Maurizio’s live act is visually captivating, as the linked videoclips illustrate, and has the effect of capturing the attention of the most diverse and variedly predisposed audiences.
Maurizio Ravalico – Percussion
Isambard Khroustaliov – Electronics