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TU M'

Monochromes Vol.3

OUT FEBRUARY 28, 2025 on all digital listening platforms

Monochromes Vol.3 is a continued collection of works created between 2008-2009 by Italian multimedia duo Tu m’. The Monochromes volumes are a series of modular audio and video compositions for electric chamber ensemble intended as fragile atmospheric colors made of sound, light, space. Monochromes Vol.3 serves as the final volume of this, now, trilogy.

Previously unreleased, these additional nine billowing, cloud-like pieces casting a feeling of suspension are a continuation of the prior Tu m’ albums Monochromes Vol.1 (LINE_040) and Monochromes Vol.2 (LINE_142) published on LINE in 2009 and 2023 respectively. Vol.1 is one of the most downloaded, streamed, and cherished in the LINE back catalog, voted among the 15 best releases of 2009 in the area of electronic music by The Wire magazine.

LINE is happy to be able to have this final hour long collection of archival works presented after 16 years.

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For more information on these works along with the accompanying video excerpts can be viewed at tu-m.com/monochromes.

“Ambient music with the big A of course. If Brian Eno has artistic children then their names are Tu m’.”
—Vital Weekly, NL

“Like the waves of an ocean that have been crashing against this beach for thousands of years, and many years to come, this music is new and ancient – it exists all the time, somewhere completely on its own, only to be summoned into this moment with the press of a button.”
—Headphone Commute (BEST OF 2009 LIST)

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Catalog:
LINE_159
Format:
digital
Edition:
open edition
Release:
February 2025
Tracklist:

Monochrome # 31 (07:11)
Monochrome # 32 (04:24)
Monochrome # 33 (08:05)
Monochrome # 34 (06:25)
Monochrome # 35 (06:24)
Monochrome # 36 (09:19)
Monochrome # 37 (05:07)
Monochrome # 38 (10:38)
Monochrome # 39 (03:58)

Music composed and performed by Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli.

Recorded live at Vico Santa Chiara Studio, Città Sant’Angelo, Italy, between April 2008 and January 2009. Compiled in June 2024.

Cover image: Still from the video “Monochrome # V06”, 2008.

TU M’ was a multimedia duo from Città Sant’Angelo (Pescara, Italy); formed by Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli in 1998; they worked until 2011 in the fields of electronic music, video art, photography and graphic design. Through a personal use of digital and analog instruments, the TU M’ revealed a complex universe made up of present and past, closeness and distance, where seeing and listening became a meditative contemplation.

During the years their compositions were well received by the critics and the public, have been released for labels including: Line (USA), Headz (Japan), Dekorder (Germany), Fällt (UK), Cut (Swiss), Ers/Staalplaat (NL) and Phthalo (USA); along with various participations on Bip-Hop (France), Crónica (Portugal), Mute (UK), FatCat (UK), Innova (USA), Bottrop Boy (Germany), Term. (USA), Ache (Canada), CubicFabric (Japan) and others.

The duo worked in various fields along with numerous musicians and artists including: Andrea Gabriele, Steve Roden, Simon Fisher Turner, Frank Metzger, Annja Krautgasser, Dan Warburton, Sawako, Claudio Sinatti, Bianco-Valente and others.

Their audio-visual works have been presented and exhibited in various museums and galleries including: Castello di Rivoli (Torino, Italy), Arnolfini Gallery (Bristol, UK), Macro (Roma, Italy), Stuk Art Centre (Brussels, Belgium), Oboro (Montreal, Canada), Ica (London, UK), Reykjavik Art Museum (Reykjavik, Iceland), Cia Center Of Icelandic Art (Reykjavik, Iceland), Kunst Meran (Merano, Italy), Centro d’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci (Prato, Italy), Università degli Studi di Napoli (Napoli, Italy), Warehouse Contemporary Art (Teramo, Italy), Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea (Monfalcone, Italy), Civica Galleria D’Arte Moderna di Gallarate (Varese, Italy), Palazzo Lucarini Contemporary (Trevi, Italy), Zelle Arte Contemporanea (Palermo, Italy), Not Gallery (Napoli, Italy), New Chinatown Barbershop Gallery (Los Angeles, USA), Pianissimo Gallery (Milano, Italy), T293 Gallery (Napoli, Italy), Batofar (Paris, France), Purple Institute (Paris, France), Neon Gallery (Bologna, Italy). And in various festivals including: ArezzoWave Festival (Arezzo, Italy), Dissonanze/Enzimi (Roma, Italy), Napoli Film Festival (Napoli, Italy), Videominuto (Prato, Italy), Sintesi Festival (Napoli, Italy) and others.

Their works have been published in various catalogues and magazines including: The Wire, Flash Art, Arte e Critica, Laurence King, Skira/Rizzoli, Mondadori, Liberation, NY Arts Magazine, BBC Music, De:Bug, Glamour, Musica Di Repubblica, Blow Up, Rumore and others.

In 2002 they set up and managed for three years their web project – Tu m’p3 Soundtracks For Images – a research on the possible relationships between music and image in various cultural contexts. Over 180 musicians and composers from every corner of the world were invited to produce an unedited soundtrack to a series of digital postcards made by TU M’ themselves. The archive contained 230 freely downloadable mp3s, totalling nearly 12 hours of music.

From 2003 to 2009 they managed the recording label – Mr Mutt – where they documented the work of international composers and ensembles which explored the various shades of electronic music.

From 2003 to 2011 they ran the obscure formation – MMO – Magical Mystery Orchestra; and the musical ensemble – Steno – along with the German artist and musician Frank Metzger. In it they explored a personal world made up of second-hand music.

www.tu-m.com

REVIEWS OF
Monochromes Vol.3

  • At the dawn of the new millennium, the collaboration between Rossano Polidoro, Emiliano Romanelli and Andrea Gabriele took shape in the Tu M’ project, a tribute to the homonymous painting by Marcel Duchamp—a title that reads as a suspended, verb-less “you… me.” If in Duchamp’s work the task of completing the meaning is left to the viewer, in Tu M’s music that same responsibility falls to the listener. After all, it’s within that blind spot that ambient often thrives: an incorporeal art where unease and serenity can coexist in the same whisper, depending on the listener’s perception.

    Driven by the intent to establish a connection between ambient, glitch and drone music—and reduced to a duo after Gabriele’s departure in 2002—the project began to distill a concept marked by faint contours: a never-localized elsewhere, a blurred becoming. This path was not only shaped in sound design but also in visual form: Tu M’ is also a video-installation and photographic project, whose material (marked by the dry, squared, hyper-reductionist aesthetics typical of the 2000s) is still available on their website.

    The third volume of Monochromes arrives two years after the second, but more significantly, sixteen years after the first. Little foreshadowed these posthumous returns: the duo officially disbanded in 2012, and since then, their emissions—mental diaries of secluded visions—gradually dissolved into the web’s underground mesh, the very same network that once nourished them via netlabels and independent distros. For those who have lost themselves in the rarest strands of ambient, Monochromes Vol. 1 remains one of the genre’s most evocative and penetrating inner journals. Like Celer playing at the bottom of a boundless ocean, the duo explored the cosmos through dronic caresses and crepuscular ripples, crafting one of the most ethereal and contemplative forms of the genre—a sort of Stars Of The Lid turned minimalist laptop-music, stripped of any material anchor.

    Let’s go back to the compendium, the beginning of the triptych. Monochromes gathers live recordings made for an A/V installation held in the summer of 2008, in Città Sant’Angelo, a town in the province of Pescara. What speaks is the breath of synthetic waves, like a Brian Eno stretched between two worlds, within a cosmic stillness that disintegrates the self to dissolve it into the eternal. Armed with two laptops, two mixers, two speakers and a video projector, the installation unfolded as a study on fragility—through audio-visual dissolves and one-dimensional sonic suspensions, defining a sensory perimeter where a constant hiss acts as the axis for infinite loops.

    Vol. 3 continues the enchantment of its predecessors and expands it with further emotional immersions, where the escape from daily frenzy unfolds into a silent, regenerative retreat. It’s an abyssal suspension, a mystification of the less-is-more ethos: for the hour the album lasts, everything burdensome seems to melt away. There is no pain, and the self is undone. The ambient-drone theorem here mirrors the Buddhist concept of a drop in the ocean: a harmonic dilution of identity, where the individual is dematerialized into a broader breath. At times, echoes of the finest William Basinski emerge, and Tu M’, without ever raising their voice, brush against equally deep summits. If the first volume opened a threshold and the second consolidated it, this third one intensifies the peak, sealing the hypnotic power of a triptych with no center, orbiting only around its own breath. It’s a meditative art that drifts into the hypnagogic, where sleep paralysis does not frighten but consoles—and becomes a trace of cosmic belonging. 8/10
    —ondarock.com

  • Some projects are like unfinished sentences, their echoes lingering long after the speaker has walked away. Tu m’, the Italian duo of Rossano Polidoro and Emiliano Romanelli, left their mark in electronic and audiovisual experimentation before dissolving into silence in 2011. Now, 16 years later, Monochromes Vol. 3 arrives as a posthumous coda, a final breath in their long meditation on texture, space, and impermanence.

    The Monochromes series has always been about subtlety – “fragile atmospheric colors made of sound, light, space”, as they put it. But Monochromes Vol. 3 carries an additional weight, not just as a continuation but as a conclusion. The pieces – numbered 31 through 39, as if they were entries in an ongoing journal – unfold with a slow, weightless grace, their billowing tones and delicate digital murmurations resisting time, gravity, or any kind of resolution.

    There’s an almost painterly quality to these works. If Brian Eno dreamt up ambient music as something to exist “as ignorable as it is interesting”, Tu m’ push that idea further —towards something that feels more like Rothko’s color fields or Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes. Each track is a monochrome not just in name but in experience: a single, immersive hue that shifts so gradually it tricks the mind into believing nothing is happening, until you suddenly realize you’ve drifted somewhere else entirely.

    Take “Monochrome # 36”, for instance—nine minutes of slowly breathing resonance, a kind of sonic afterimage that lingers even after it fades. Or “Monochrome # 38”, the album’s longest piece, where distant frequencies ebb and dissolve like light through a fogged window. The whole album functions as an extended exhale, one that lasts just over an hour but seems to stretch indefinitely, beyond the constraints of any timestamp.

    Listening to “Monochromes Vol. 3” is less about seeking out detail and more about surrendering to its atmosphere. Like waves that have been crashing against the shore for thousands of years, it is both new and ancient, its presence neither demanding nor indifferent. Perhaps that’s why it resonates so deeply – it doesn’t ask to be understood, only experienced.

    And so, with this final volume, Tu m’ disappear into the ether one last time. Not with a bang, not even with a whisper—just the faintest shimmer on the horizon, fading into the monochrome of memory.
    —chaindlk.com