ADE DEA: a cover version

43 minutes 95 pages Time Based Editions’ first ‘cover version’, by musicians Ulla and Perila, pollinates ADE DEA, Sara Rossi’s stunning photographic reconnaissance of a barely-lit botanical underworld. Tracing the images with eyes, fingers and ears, we follow the growing and dying pains of a deciduous world.

This is a ‘cover version’ in both a musical and publishing sense: a new cover is wrapped around someone else’s book, with a commissioned soundtrack expanding its contents. The soundtrack is accessed via QR code on the cover. Under this cover is ADE DEA, published in 2024 by Gli Ori: a ‘twilight magic herbarium’ by artist Sara Rossi, whose photographs testify to a decade of sunset encounters at the city’s edge.

LOG (multiform musicians Ulla and Perila), with their own masterful navigation of light and darkness, guide us through the pages of this mysterious territory with a delicate and evolving long-form listen composed of filigree, edge-land textures shifting between the organic and the synthetic. Field recordings and found-sound percussives give way with the seasons to colour – warm chords, delicious gasps, liquid explosions.

Rossi’s photographs are equally vivid and delicate, capturing different wild flowers and plants often caught in a single ray of sunlight against a backdrop of dark forest. Developed over a decade, she speaks of the project as “a reconnaissance. A hunt. A sort of twilight magic herbarium that emerged from a vast series of excursions in the parks around Milan, in Brianza and then towards the sea. Border zones between city and countryside, wilderness and micro-ecosystems are traversed in search of an encounter with the wild, witnessing beauty precisely where we assume there is none, that is, in Milan’s surroundings. An area among the most artificial and cemented-over in Italy and Europe.”

Among the pages we see the letters A, D, E emerge from dried twigs. Known for her ludic observations and wordplay, Rossi notes that ADE is Italian for Hades, “so linked to the idea of the project, linked to darkness but also to the transition from light to dark. The Greek/Latin realm of the dead was a real physical place, which could even be accessed on earth from certain places, difficult to reach or otherwise secret and inaccessible to mortals. ADE is masculine, in Italian. Hades was a realm, but also a male God. ADE’s anagram, DEA, is feminine, and means Goddess in Italian. Persephone was goddess of the underworld with her husband Hades during Autumn and Winter. And in Spring-Summer, she’d go up to visit her mother on Earth, causing flowers to blossom as she passed. ADE becomes a play on words but also an indication of the territory we are traversing with a feeling of fear and dismay, bewilderment and amazement.”

These last four words could well describe also the spoken guide woven into the soundtrack leading us from page to page: two voices speaking in sync, one old and granular, the other a child. Ant Hampton has contributed a shape-shifting, unplaceable, composite identity, navigating our path through undergrowth and underworld, as well as choreographing our hands and vision (hiding an image with our palm, creating slow fades through closing eyes, squeezing a page’s corner to hear what’s coming…) This synchronicity of sound, image and physical participation creates a unique, sensual attention, a ‘here-and-now of the page’ uncannily complementing Rossi’s images and offering a powerful and immersive new approach to long-form listening: our eyes, plunging into these paged-through scenes, anchor our ears’ attention to an exquisitely detailed and filigree soundscape.

“The idea of ‘the cover version’ was one David and I loved since first conceiving of this imprint. We figured one could make a Time Based Editions experience from any print material… shopping catalogues, driving manuals; everything’s game. We were mindful that ‘covering’ a book could be done with varying degrees of support or antagonism towards the material we’d be appropriating and the people behind it. With this project it feels the cooperation between us, LOG, Sara Rossi and her publishers speaks to certain forms of symbiosis one finds in nature, but also within electronic music where tracks expect to be mixed with each other, with or without beats, or where separate elements are handed between musicians for recomposition via remix”. – Ant Hampton

Created in May 2024 in Camogli, Italy, during a residency made possible thanks to the kind support of Eva Neklyaeva and Marco Cendron.

Music and sound: LOG (Ulla & Perila)
Photography in ADE DEA: Sara Rossi
Concept and dramaturgy: Ant Hampton
Voice: Mia Hampton / Gabriel
Time Based Editions cover design: Roland Brauchli