The recordings began shortly after reading, almost a year ago, "L'Assommoir" (1877) by Émile Zola. I devoured it in a month. It is one of those books that I store for a while because I imagined sooner or later I would be struck by it. Each book has its own appropriate time to be read. After returning to Naples in some difficult situations, it was time to read it.

Naples today does not differ much from the suburbs of the nineteenth century described by Zola. Leaving aside the untidiness of the streets in cause of ugliness and incivility (it is the penultimate city in terms of livability in Italy this year), here there is no longer a reference in which to mirror oneself, there is no longer empathy (if it ever existed), there is no humanity. There are only shitty people who give a damn about their neighbors and a sort of absurd, bloody, uncivilized generational recycling. And lost souls who act in the worst way for themselves and for others.

There is no respect, there is no present.

Soon after I read "The Human Variable" (2019) by Lorenza Ronzano. The choice couldn't be different. At the heart of the narrative there are the people who find themselves the weak link in the chain of society.

These people have no choice, they break up.
When they break apart, society is defeated, and we inevitably lose.
They are invisible, they succumb.
They either go crazy or get drunk.

We are not a hospitable country, we are unable to welcome, we tend to deteriorate.

To the latter we can add "the good people" forced to stay in this city and to endure all kinds of civilization and injustice (first of all from their fellow citizens).

And then other types of marginal subjects. People who can't find a place.

The gone mad migrants who roam the neighborhoods and the Neapolitan idlers in their sixties looking for any expedient to scrape up 5 euros and gamble them immediately-

This is a summary.

I've thought about it a lot, and "In your honor" is for them.

- Antoine Iannone (august 2022)

°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°°

Imagine "City Portrait", that admirable match between concrete and electronic music that represented a watershed in the sonic world of the mid-1950s avant-garde. Imagine the alienating abstractions of early industrial music and its cold description of the Western crisis.

Imagine the acousmatic art that has pervaded the most courageous multimedia installations for years. And now place all this incandescent stuff in the harsh everyday life of a city full of contradictions like Naples: only in this way the slaughterhouse evoked by the literary suggestions of Antonio Iannone will not seem so far-fetched to you.

"In Your Honor" is a short, raw sonic journey into a disintegrating social fabric, desperate for a sparkling glimmer of humanity.

- Andrea Prevignano (august 2022)