about the record

The Vestige is the first fruit of a new intergenerational collaboration between Giuseppe Ielasi, a prolific figure in the European experimental music scene, and Jack Sheen, a Manchester-based composer, conductor, and sound artist. Their approaches differ—Ielasi focusing on electro-acoustic techniques and guitar, Sheen on traditional instruments—but both share a fascination with “mysterious, liminal musical material,” using irregular repetition, cyclical forms, and spatial diffusion to create structures at once alive and almost static.

Working individually with Sheen’s acoustic instrument library and Ielasi’s guitar, the pair came together in Ielasi’s Monza studio to shape the fourteen pieces that make up The Vestige. The album’s opening, a brief burst of chirps and string glissandi woven through percussive ticks, long tones, and white-noise textures, introduces its distinctive sonic world. Across the record, Ielasi and Sheen explore ambiguous spaces where pitch and noise, repetition and irregularity, electronic and acoustic blur.

As the title suggests, the sounds often feel remote: fleeting timbres hint at wind instruments, bowed strings, or prepared guitar, yet remain vestigial, filtered through shifting textures that suggest synthesis, amplified room sound, or rubbed objects. The album shows careful attention to frequency as a compositional tool, with sub-bass, high-frequency spikes, and shifting bands creating the sense of viewing a scene from multiple, impossible angles.