The experimental duo of Italian-Swiss, Zürich-based electric guitarist Luigi Archetti and Swiss, Berlin-based cellist Bo Wiget has been working together regularly on a wide variety of projects since 1994. They often use their instruments as sound sources for electronic manipulation, augmented by their own extended techniques. Their music oscillates between free improvisation, minimalism, contemporary music, electronic music and elements of experimental pop.
The duo’s eleventh album, Gekritzel (scratch in German), was released seven years after tho’s previous album, Welfformat (Die Schachtel, 2019), and like all Archetti and Wiget’s projects, explores a hybrid of working methods – individual improvisations that were developed together into multilayered, detailed, and concise pieces, together with electronic manipulations and distortions and notated elements, and letting all feed and flow into one another. Archetti and Wiget expanded their arsenal on this album with toy piano, voice, recorder, and electric bass.
The album’s title suggests the sketchy, loose, and free improvised spirit of the thirteen short “Bleistift” (pencil) pieces. These austere and melancholic cinematic pieces sound as part of a long, dream-like suite, filled with sudden, brief silences and minimalist sonic strokes. These genre-defying pieces refuse to surrender to dramatic narratives, but patiently and gently intensify their mysterious yet vulnerable, emotional presence.
Luigi Archetti & Bo Wiget – Gekritzel (Unit, 2026)
