Sven Wunder - Natura Morta (2021 Piano Piano Vinyl LP)

Sven Wunder - Natura Morta | Vinyl LP - 2021 Piano Piano Repress (PP1003)

Sven Wunder followed Eastern Flowers (2019) and Wabi Sabi (2020) with a third album that moved its conceptual frame from Turkish-Anatolian folk and Japanese aesthetics to Italian visual art. Natura Morta — "dead nature" in Italian, the traditional term for still life painting — takes the genre's history as its structural and thematic organiser. The album opens with "En Plein Air," which refers to the practice of painting in natural outdoor light, and moves through "Impasto" (the technique of applying paint in thick, textured strokes), "Prussian Blue" (the synthetic pigment that replaced natural lapis lazuli), "Alla Prima" (wet-on-wet painting, completed in a single session), "Umber" (the earth pigment from Umbria), the Baroque reference of "Barocco, Ma Non Troppo," and "Pentimento" — the word for traces of earlier paint layers visible beneath the surface of a finished work. "Memento Mori" is both a genre of still life painting and a Latin phrase meaning "remember that you will die."

The musical approach is the synthesis of Wunder's previous two albums: the jazz-funk rhythmic language of Eastern Flowers combined with the broader orchestral and atmospheric range of Wabi Sabi, now with a 15-piece string section and closer ties to the Italian library tradition of the 1970s.