tellKujira - La lucha es un poema colectivo

A Closer Listen

In November 2023, tellKujira found themselves in Paris during a residency at IRCAM while workers at the Centre Georges Pompidou were protesting outside, demanding the protection of their rights. Entering a space dedicated to artistic and technological innovation while hundreds of people faced the prospect of losing their jobs proved a disorienting experience, and La lucha è un poema collettivo is framed by that encounter. Although rooted in this particular episode, the record continually opens onto broader questions surrounding solidarity, collective action, and the ways music can respond to political experience.

The opening En grève begins in what feels like experimental improvisation, integrating field recordings and a cut-up, looped speech in Castilian about solidarity before veering in unexpected directions. Layers of strings accumulate with intensity, building toward a rapturous and abrupt collapse that gives way to the viola slipping into an enveloping mood of softness, something that feels almost like reconciliation after confrontation. The piece embodies the group’s interest in shifting perspectives: samples, instruments, and textures interact revealing contradictions and tensions.

Mexican field recordings return in ¡Que viva México!, a brief but evocative interlude. Rather than attempting to represent Mexico, the piece captures something of its overwhelming sonic density, where human presence itself becomes a form of resistance. Guitars and strings then move to the foreground in the counterintuitively titled Tarantella, which avoids any easy recourse to Southern Italian folk quotation. Instead, cyclical arpeggios introduce a hypnotic and incantatory mood.

By the time we reach the closing Walking on the Beach / What to Love and Fight For, the album has already guided the listener into a contemplative state. Plucked strings, a giggling child, gentle guitar lines, and field recordings create a richly textured sonic field in which different acoustic suggestions pull the ear in multiple directions at once. Fragments of poetry surface and dissolve without ever coalescing into a stable narrative: “I like walking on the beach / we cannot stop / with closed eyes / unrevealed secrets / to be 16, 14, 15, 40, 100…” Memories, desires, and possibilities drift in and out of focus. The listener is left to assemble their own meanings from these scattered traces, until the album suddenly comes to a close on a single breath taken.

This is a beautifully produced album, rich in texture and detail. Without romanticising struggle or reducing politics to slogans, La lucha es un poema colectivo acknowledges that there is no truly non-ideological listening position. Instead, it frames activism, solidarity, and collective experience in ways that invite reflection rather than prescribe conclusions. Through its intricate layering of field recordings, instrumental interplay, and fragmented texts, the album asks listeners to actively participate in the album and assemble their own connections between sounds and ideas. In doing so, it transforms listening from a passive act into a form of engagement, rendering La lucha es un poema colectivo not simply a record about collective action, but a genuinely participatory experience.

To tell us more about the production process, tellKujira (Ambra Chiara Michelangeli – Viola, Francesco Diodati – Guitar, Francesco Guerri – Cello and Stefano Calderano – Guitar) have kindly answered a few questions via email.

The title La lucha es un poema colectivo (“The Struggle Is a Collective Poem”) emerged from your experience at IRCAM while workers at the Centre Pompidou were protesting outside. How did that encounter shape the album? Did it change the way you thought about the relationship between artistic creation and collective action?

The album title does not refer exclusively to the Centre Pompidou protesters. Rather, those words are part of an artistic path that has always led us toward a vision of music as a tool for sharing and transformation. You will not find, in our music, solipsistic moments aimed at showcasing individual virtuosity; instead, there is an attempt to actively guide the listener into that process of secondary creation that emerges through immersive listening.

One example can be found in the central section of “En grève”, a very long passage built around layers that gradually accumulate in intensity, where this invitation becomes almost explicit. The same process, the same attention, can be found throughout the entire album.

The opening piece, “En grève” (“On Strike”), unfolds over more than sixteen minutes and seems to inhabit a space between tension, endurance, and solidarity. How did you approach translating the atmosphere of a strike into sound, and what role did improvisation play in shaping the piece?

“En grève” emerged from a plurality of materials. Some of them—particularly the instrumental ones—had been developed over the years preceding the recording of the album, during rehearsals and concerts, while others were created during our residency at IRCAM.

This extended period of experimentation and creation in Paris, far from our usual habits, made it clear that there was an urgent need to adopt a new creative process, one in which the surrounding context could enter forcefully into the work. It was an exhausting compositional effort, one in which it was very easy to fall into clichés or predictable solutions.

What you describe as the “atmosphere of a strike” was created by making instrumental ensembles, samples, tapes, timbral textures, and harmonic structures interact as though they were figures in a Cubist painting. The point of view is constantly shifting; contradictions and opposites emerge; samples are brutally cut and edited; there is no veneer intended to make things sound pleasant. Then, at the peak of this process, the perspective turns inward and opens onto the viola’s final song. It is a heartbreaking, minimal melody that arrives like a punch to the stomach after nearly ten minutes of gradual approach, bearing witness to one of the most intriguing aspects of human nature: passion, love, and tenderness persist within us; they may hide, but they do not disappear beneath the sound of shouting voices and drums.

As for improvisation, although this ensemble is very familiar with improvisational language, I do not think that “improvisation” is the right term in this specific case. The pieces are highly structured, and every element—even the smallest nuance—carries a carefully calculated weight.

It is important to stress that, from the outset, we decided that this would not be, unlike our first album, a record based solely on performance. We were interested in creating a work that was heavily shaped through post-production. We liked the idea of extending our interplay through all the possibilities offered by studio work. In live performances, we strive to recreate this balance with great precision, and to achieve that our setup has expanded considerably, incorporating samplers and synthesizers.

“¡Que viva México!” references Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished 1930–32 film project, a work that has been described as both his greatest artistic ambition and his greatest personal tragedy. What drew you to Eisenstein’s abandoned vision of Mexico, and do you see any parallels between the film’s unfinished nature and contemporary political or artistic struggles?

The unfinished can be beautiful when it leaves room for imagination and becomes fertile ground for both our own fantasies and those of the listener.

We began from a purely musical process, creating a symmetrical counterpart to “Tarantella,” and later worked with additional arpeggios and field recordings collected in Mexico to express our own perspective. The perception of a place can be highly subjective—like the game of partially covering your ears in order to focus on certain sounds rather than others.

Quite naturally, we were drawn to the kaleidoscopic humanity reflected so intensely in the sounds that literally overwhelm anyone visiting those places. It becomes a form of human resistance to the political forces that continue to devastate Latin America and the societies that compose it.

“Tarantella” is an intriguing title because listeners might expect a direct engagement with Southern Italian folk traditions, yet the piece seems to avoid any obvious folkloric quotation. What interested you about the idea of the tarantella, and how did you reinterpret its cultural and symbolic associations without relying on folk material itself?

The title emerged during the composition of the piece and refers in particular to the cyclical movement of the arpeggio and to a certain hypnotic repetition that is never exactly the same twice. This becomes the red thread of a journey through moments of disorientation and lyrical passages that contrast with the central riff.

As with the other pieces, we were not pursuing a specific aesthetic goal, but rather an inner meaning that could be reflected in music as directly as possible. To achieve this, we worked extensively on details, stripping sounds bare. What initially appears to be a simple arpeggio gradually reveals a sense of estrangement and, at the same time, physical resistance—a struggle with the instrument itself.

In this sense it recalls the endless tarantellas described in the writings of Ernesto De Martino, which captured the attention of the tarantolato and induced a trance-like state intended to expel the spider’s venom. The relationship between the individual—particularly women, in the case of the tarantolate—and the community becomes a struggle for life itself.

A similar process can also be found in “Walking on the Beach – What to Love and Fight For,” where elements drawn from African and African-American traditions are isolated and used individually within a completely different context.

The album was conceived during a residency at IRCAM, a place strongly associated with technological research and experimental composition. How did that environment influence the music? Did the contrast between the institution’s highly specialised artistic context and the social realities unfolding outside its walls become part of the record’s conceptual framework?

Our residency at IRCAM and our work with Somax2—a software environment for musical improvisation and composition using AI, machine listening, cognitive memory activation models, and multi-agent architectures—were decisive. They facilitated and accelerated a process that was already underway in our artistic practice.

The most interesting aspect of that period of research was precisely the effort not to lose ourselves chasing the easy illusions and mirages that often accompany new technologies. It was important to spend enough time with these tools to gain the necessary distance from them and to develop the critical awareness needed to avoid self-referential or purely aestheticizing dynamics.

Allowing the real world, with all its political and social implications, to enter the work was also a way of making the best possible use of technology by placing it entirely in the service of meaning.

The closing track, “Walking on the Beach / What to Love and Fight For,” ends the album with what feels like an open question and with a text/poem which seems like a dialogue between different generations or the final message of a dying person. In a time marked by political uncertainty, social fragmentation, and ongoing conflicts, what are the things that you personally believe are still worth loving and fighting for? And how does music help articulate those values? And what can you tell us about the use of field recordings and found sounds within this particular track but also, more in general, in your work?

The final text is the result of merging two poems by Alice Keller and Elena Chiattelli, read by Chiara Guidi.

There are many, many things worth fighting for, and just as many that deserve to be loved. Everyone has their own causes and their own struggles, but perhaps what we all increasingly feel is the need to become a community—to rediscover the signs that unite us and weave them together into a single fabric.

All of the field recordings move in that direction. They emerge like icebergs from our memory and define both the space and the boundaries of the world inhabited by this album. (Gianmarco Del Re)