Cover image: Sulla Lingua. Credit massimo golfieri

Sulla Lingua (solo sets)

Goolugatup Heathcote, 5 November 2025

Sulla Lingua is a black-metal / dirge-art-rock band (or “sludge rock” as one critic put it) combining the talents of three formidable musicians, each with a strong solo practice. The ensemble features Anthony Pateras (Melbourne), together with Stefano Pilia and Riccardo la Foresta (both from Italy).

Currently on tour performing in what the poster describes as “band and solo formats across Australia,” Wednesday’s Goolugatup gig featured solo sets from each of Pilia, La Foresta and Pateras, in the lead up to Friday’s ensemble performance at the Buffalo Club (Fremantle).

Pilia came on stage first, using his electric guitar to trigger (or be processed into) organ sounds, not altogether unlike Ennio Morricone’s soundtrack to The Thing (1982), but with more layers and overlapping harmonics. Each refrain initially consisted of stepped sets of three.

Later the guitar was played relatively unadorned but with reverb and echo, producing more wistful and conventionalised atmospherics, while in a different section again, Pilia moved into great rumbling sheets of noise.

Simple in structure, each section introduced in a few phrases the motifs to work with and this was then repeated with subtle variations. Transitions between sections were abruptly marked by a leap to the modular synthesiser, with often quite crackling and screaming electro motifs punctuating short silences and elisions.

Overall, Pila’s set was a masterful rendition of minimalist-maximalist composition, calling for both close listening to details, as well as encouraging a meditative zoning in and out with the extended repetitions.

We then moved to a side gallery to marvel cluster around La Foresta’s assemblage of drums entitled the “drummophone”. Drums were played using vibrations produced by blowing air through tubes which came out in the centre of a small, flattened cymbals, each of which was placed on top a different sized drum.

Demonstrating how this works, La Foresta first tapped a small hand drum while blowing into a tube, and then used his breath alone to animate a second larger hand drum, also using one hand to subtly change the note being emitted by pressing and releasing his fingers onto the larger drum skin. Particularly with the bigger drum, the sound produced was like the overdrive produced by a bass amplifier if you leave a guitar plugged in and lying against the speaker—yet here made with acoustic processes.

La Foresta then powered up his very loud installation, which used principals of acoustic resonance and frequency reinforcement as in the work of Alvin Lucier. Sounds amplified within the cylinders of the drums bounced off the walls to come back and further agitate the drum skins. The drums therefore—quite independently—gently fought against each other, before settling into a mutually reinforcing, complex noisy drone.

La Foresta then tightened or loosened the drumheads to create new states. The system was so sensitive that holding a hand over the skins altered the frequencies, as with a Theremin. It was another simple and beautiful work, here with the added sculptural appeal of the central drum array and its looping tubes.

The evening concluded with Pateras’ stomping electronica set. Although some sounds, particularly towards the end, were exotic and at times extremely noisy and distorted, and the beats were complex and asymmetric, the near constant percussive undertones of electronically produced kick drums, high-hats, and so on, made this essentially a wonderful IDM set, such as one might find on Dark Mofo’s main stages.

After some stunning twisted IDM, Pateras moved into an extended drone break, before returning with harder, heavier and more distorted, unbalanced percussion and atmospheres, recalling to some degree the drill funk of Venetian Snares and Dat Politics.

Pateras’ status as one of Australia’s leading pianists was also visibly on display in his gestural performance above the equipment set up, with Pateras quickly anticipating musical shifts with a paused gesture above the table before dramatically whipping his arm behind his back after triggering a change, or punching at the keypads with an aggression worthy of Franz Liszt’s high Romantic pianism.

It was in short a great way to end a night of virtuosic and varied musical expressions.

Sulla Lingua, 5 November 2025 at Goolugatup Heathcote & 7 November 2025 at the Buffalo Club, Fremantle.