Marta Salogni & Stefano Pilia - Phren Marta Salogni & Stefano Pilia

“Phren” is the third release of Opale, a series curated by Maple Death and publishing house Canicola Edizioni, sister imprints that for last decade have been exploring and researching the intersection of music and narrative through images and sound, giving life to new dialogues between the two languages, with a visionary and militant approach. Each Opale release will see the parallel production of an LP and illustrated book, linked together by a red thread that runs through atmospheres, emotional temperatures, glimpses of content, and collected in a precious limited edition box set that include posters and unique designs. Marta Salogni & Stefano Pilia’s album is accompanied by artwork, images and a 32 page Singer stitch binding illustrated book/carnet d’artiste by Sarah Mazzetti. Sarah Mazzetti is an Italian illustrator and visual artist whose work moves between drawing, publishing and visual storytelling. Her illustrations have appeared in publications including The New York Times, The New Yorker, Die Zeit and The Guardian, and she has collaborated with brands such as Louis Vuitton and Dr. Martens. She is the author of several illustrated books, including works published by Canicola Edizioni. Her practice explores the relationship between narrative, memory and imagined worlds.
A structure rises from the water: an object suspended between architecture and landscape, between reflection and depth. Its surface mirrors the world around it, while within its walls another space exists, a place of listening, isolation and encounter.
Phren, the first collaborative work by Marta Salogni and Stefano Pilia, emerges as a layered and articulated sound-hymn-dialogue between Stefano’s abstract guitar work and Marta’s manipulation of tape machines. Conceived alongside the imagined space created by Sarah Mazzetti for the Opale series, a project by Maple Death Records and Canicola edizioni, the album becomes a form-shifting composition where memory itself is continuously transformed through resonance, repetition and reconfiguration.
Here, sound is not preserved as an object of the past, but treated as a living material: something capable of carrying traces, absorbing new meanings and generating unfamiliar voices.
The album develops from a simple yet constantly shifting principle: a sound is set in motion and then passed through a series of interconnected systems where it is delayed, altered and returned in another form. Stefano Pilia’s guitar travels through a complex chain of modular processes, composed of different stages of preamplification and filtering, before entering a tape echo system that introduces further layers of repetition, resonance and spatial displacement. These signals are then absorbed into Marta Salogni’s Revox tape machines, where additional lines of delay, modulation and environmental transformation reshape the material once again.
The resulting music is not a dialogue between two instruments, but a shared system — a living architecture in which a single signal moves simultaneously through parallel and serial pathways, gathering traces of each passage. Sound becomes a material in constant motion: a gesture becomes an echo, the echo becomes a new gesture, and the distinction between origin and reflection gradually begins to dissolve.