luciano chessa & squncr - Ç

A Closer Listen

Ç is steeped in the artistic geography of the Côte d’Azur, not the postcard Riviera of luxury and spectacle, but a landscape shaped by experimentation, friendship, and play. Drawing inspiration from places associated with Jean Cocteau, Robert Filliou, Georges Brecht, and the Fluxus milieu, Luciano Chessa and François Larini (aka squncr) wander through a sonic terrain dense with artistic memory.

The duo’s instrumentation—đàn bầu, zither, organetta, electronics, eBows and assorted objects—produces a sound world suspended between the ancient and the futuristic. Yet despite its experimental vocabulary, the album rarely feels austere. Instead, it is animated by curiosity, humour and a spirit of play. The opening track, “Finding Filliou”, interprets play as a dimension of freedom or, to paraphrase Herbert Marcuse, as self-distraction: relaxing oneself, forgetting oneself and recuperating oneself.

“Trinquette”, named after the Villefranche-sur-Mer jazz club, provides scope for merrymaking and jollity, as Roger Caillois might have suggested. Elsewhere, “La Cédille qui Sourit” offers a quieter counterpart. Built around resonant tones and gently recurring piano figures, the track moves with a reflective melodic grace that recalls the spirit of Filliou and Brecht’s legendary storefront laboratory of games, conversations, impossible projects and “cloud castles”.

That legacy hovers throughout the record. Like the Fluxus artists who treated art as a form of play rather than a finished product, Chessa and Larini seem less concerned with arriving at conclusions than with creating situations in which sounds can interact, drift and surprise. The result is music that feels simultaneously meditative and mischievous. Even the darker passages of “Rue Obscure” or the luminous stillness of “Chapelle Saint-Pierre” retain an openness that privileges process over destination.

More than a tribute to a particular artistic lineage, Ç embodies it. It understands play as a serious mode of attention, a way of listening, forgetting oneself and, ultimately, finding oneself again. In that sense, it is both a work of place and a celebration of the enduring possibility of artistic freedom.

To navigate us through the making of the album, Chessa and Larini kindly agreed to answer a few questions via email.

Ç (Luciano Chessa x squncr)

The album is deeply rooted in specific places around Monaco and the Côte d’Azur—Chapelle Saint-Pierre, Rue Obscure, Trinquette, and ultimately La Cédille qui Sourit. How much of Ç should be understood as a kind of sonic cartography of the region, and how did these locations shape the music beyond simply providing titles?

François Larini (squncr): This « French Riviera context » shapes the whole project, and it is also the place where we first met (Luciano spent one year in residency in Monaco, supported by the Principality’s Cultural Affairs, and I was, at this time, in charge of the Théâtre Princesse Grace, Monaco’s national theater, where I curated Luciano’s sound installation and performance Monaco Mobile / Monaco Veloce). So we could say it’s a riviera far removed from the usual clichés.

Ç evokes places linked to a very particular period in the artistic history of the Côte d’Azur and Art history in general. Beyond the well-known glamour, this area has a very rich artistic heritage for more than 100 years, which has spread worldwide from Diaghilev and the Ballets Russes in Monaco, to Picasso in Antibes, via the Nouveau Réalisme in Nice or this Fluxus episode in Villefranche (to name a few…) I was born here, and so this subjective cartography of the riviera was already present in my horizons. These certainly include my last squncr solo project, The Moorish Shield (2025), inspired by the tumultuous history of the neighboring Villa La Mauresque in Saint-Jean Cap Ferrat.

Robert Filliou and Georges Brecht’s La Cédille qui Sourit seems to hover over the entire project, not only in the title but in the spirit of experimentation, playfulness and openness that characterised their space in Villefranche-sur-Mer. What aspects of their legacy resonated most strongly with you, and do you see Ç as a contemporary continuation of some of those Fluxus ideas?

Luciano Chessa: I have been studying Fluxus since I read Maciunas’ 1965 Fluxus Art-Amusement manifesto at the house of my piano teacher, Gisella Frontero (Gisella was friends with the likes of Giuseppe Chiari, Giancarlo Cardini, Sylvano Bussotti, and John Cage). I was 11 years old: you can imagine the effect! Perhaps the most significant point of contact between Robert Filliou and me is our mutual interest in Luigi Russolo’s noise aesthetics.

In Filliou’s case, it manifested itself in his translation of Russolo’s Art of Noises manifesto for the Great Bear Pamphlet series, published in 1967 as #18 by Dick Higgins’ Something Else Press. While it was not the first English translation of Russolo’s manifesto, this publication was widely influential due to the timeliness of its appearance in the midst of the 1960s New York loft scene (I spoke in details with beloved late Alison [Knowles] about this history.)

Additionally, over the years I met and worked with several of Filliou’s qassociates. Having participated in countless Fluxus-related events in New York, San Francisco, Berlin, and elsewhere, I came to share many mutual friends with him. I was also fortunate enough to see the brilliant survey Seule la Fête est Permanente | Works 1962–1984, held at Peter Freeman’s Gallery in New York in 2018. That said, François and I did not intentionally conceive Ç as a continuation of Brecht and Filliou’s ideas. Rather, we created Ç with an awareness of them, while freely surrendering ourselves to time, place, atmosphere, and emotions.

Luciano, much of your artistic practice has revolved around reconstructing lost histories—from Futurist noise instruments to overlooked figures such as Julius Eastman—while François often works with archives, field recordings and traces of place. Did you discover any common ground between those two approaches while making this album, and how did your respective relationships to memory and documentation influence the collaboration?

LC: We discovered right from the start that we both respond emotionally to longing. I frankly believe that this element, together with the fact that we both trained as pianists, we both share a similar listening history, and we do work in highly complementary ways, were the motivating factors that allowed Ç to materialize.

This specific project, Ç—which also gives its name to our duo—developed from a shared fascination with a rather specific riviera location. François has a longer personal history with it, having grown up in the nearby Monaco: so memory is likely paramount in his approach. My relationship with Villefranche is more recent and mediated, being based predominantly on documents, yet we both share on ongoing curiosity concerning the presence of figures such as Cocteau and Filliou, as well as the impianto genovese underlying the town’s construction, etc.

Often, however, the most significant source of inspiration lies not in what one remembers or discovers, but in what is forgotten or unknown, as both are powerful triggers for the imagination. We can read why the Rue Obscure was given that name, but we may also eventually forget it. Yet what still remains with us—what we “tenemus,” as in Eco’s famous rose hexameter—is the immense evocative power of words, of toponymy, and our ability to take flight with them.

photo by Luciano Chessa

The instrumentation itself is unusual: the Vietnamese đànbầu, zither, Hohner organetta, synthesizer, eBows and various objects create a sound world that feels simultaneously ancient, futuristic and placeless. Were you consciously trying to avoid recognisable musical traditions, or did the album emerge from allowing these disparate instruments and histories to converse freely with one another?

FL: This album is a conversation. The result of an encounter and a shared desire to explore possible sonic landscapes, across three long sessions at different times of the year 2024. Nothing really conscious, but the sound palette seems obvious for both of us. Vibrating strings are central to Luciano’s work. They are the heart of the intonarumori, the futurist instruments he recreated for the Perfoma Biennal 09 in NYC, originally built by Luigi Russolo in 1913. Resonances and noises are inseparable from its aesthetic.

For squncr, limitation and accident are the key elements of my aesthetics. Using vintage gear, playing an instrument that I don’t fully master, or in an unconventional way, gives a sense of fragility and provides a new way to focus on the sound, in the instant. But beyond all these considerations, Ç is – first of all – about the joy of playing together, making noise, listening to each other and letting the events flow. Very Fluxus indeed! (Gianmarco Del Re)