A low cello refrain runs under “A Quiet Pulse” from the opening, looping and insistent, the work of Redi Hasa. The track is the second single from Sound Sketches: Music Composed for the Giorgio Armani Privé 2005–2025 Exhibition, the new album from L’Antidote, out on 18 September through Ponderosa Music Records.
Hasa had the classical repertoire down by thirteen, learned in Tirana on a state-owned instrument, and he says he loves betraying that training. The 1997 civil war cut his conservatory studies short, and he reached Italy the year after on a scholarship to Lecce, carrying a cello taken from the Tirana Conservatory, the one his 2020 solo record The Stolen Cello is named for. He and his two bandmates, Iranian percussionist Bijan Chemirani and Lebanese pianist Rami Khalife, recorded “A Quiet Pulse” live off each other with nothing written down.
You can hear the looseness in how the parts arrive. The cello figure keeps returning, slow and even, the piece breathing around it. Chemirani comes in on the zarb, hand and shaker work skating over the top, and Khalife’s piano arrives late, thick with reverb and echo, before a cry cuts clean through the calm.
The cry runs back through both men’s histories. Chemirani learned the zarb from his father, the Persian master Djamchid Chemirani. Khalife, son of the Lebanese oud player Marcel Khalife, was born in Beirut during the civil war.
L’Antidote wrote Sound Sketches for the Armani/Silos galleries in Milan, to fill the rooms as visitors move through twenty years of couture. It is their second record, though they place it at the start of everything, the point where the three of them first played as one band. The trio took their name from what Khalife says music does: an antidote to reality, something that soothes and shifts how you see things.
They tour through the autumn: 22 October at Santeria Toscana 31 in Milan, 27 October at the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord in Paris, 28 October at the Teatro Cantiere Florida in Florence for the HEARTbeat Festival, and 17 November at sPAZIO211 in Turin.
Stream and listen to “A Quiet Pulse” HERE