The Engineer Is the Author: Marta Salogni and the Tape Machine

In the popular account of how records get made, the producer writes and the engineer presses record. In practice the engineer decides what a record sounds like: how much space is around a voice, whether it is in the room with you or behind glass, what survives the mix and what quietly disappears. Marta Salogni's reputation was built on exactly those decisions, across a list of records that sound nothing like each other and all sound deliberate. Her own performance work puts tape machines at the centre, used live: loops built, degraded, layered and allowed to fail in front of an audience. The appeal is the visible risk. Tape drifts, stretches and occasionally breaks, and a performer who leaves that exposed is doing something a laptop set structurally cannot, because nothing in a laptop set can go wrong in a way the audience can see. She closes Transmissions XVIII at Teatro Rasi on 21 November, on a bill with PHREN, Blak Saagan and Majid Bita, and Tristan Da Cunha. It is a fitting way to end a festival built around memory and fragile coexistence: the closing performance uses an instrument that is, literally, a medium that decays. If you make music inside a computer, there is a lesson in watching someone work with a format that resists them. The constraint is the point. Fewer undos, more decisions, and a result that carries the trace of the specific night it was made in rather than the trace of every night it could have been.

Appearance: Transmissions XVIII, Teatro Rasi, Ravenna, 21 November 2026.