A walk around the apartments of the Cité Radieuse by Stefano Meneghetti

Description of project by Stefano Meneghetti 

The songs were composed by Stefano Meneghetti who brought musicians of the calibre of Giuseppe Azzarelli, Massimiliano Donninelli, Yannick da Re and Cristian Inzerillo  to work together with him.

Deeply interested in architecture, music, and design, Stefano Meneghetti and his friends wanted to name this album La Citè Radieuse out of admiration for Le Corbusier, the legendary Corbu, multifaceted and innovative architect, designer and urban planner, who created his city-like housing project in Marseille with the aim of fostering harmonious relationships among its inhabitants.

Sound research and experimentation are the focal points of this musical partnership. The album develops an architecture of electronic sounds, which incorporates eclectic influences.

Stefano Meneghetti, graphic artist and video maker, is a long-standing collaborator of musicians such as Gary Numan, Franco Battiato, Byetone, Lorenzo Palmeri and many others.

As Giuseppe Azzarelli says: "A city is not only an environment of spaces and forms. Inevitably, it also expresses its dimension through sounds: every environment has its own acoustic imprint reflecting human activities, their relationships with the world and with each other. The idea of a Cité Radiuese, ideal and utopian city within a city, conceived by Le Corbusier for people and their needs, immediately enthralled me by its “humanity”, drawing me closer to a world of sound that can underline or accentuate possible emotional meeting points in the multifaceted reality of the modern city."

Interview to Stefano Meneghetti

"Music has helped me build parallel worlds; through this reciprocity with music I have created scenarios and stories, experiencing the world without being part of it, as if I lived observing it from a car (train?) window, through binoculars or a microscope."

"Over the course of my life, I have felt a natural affinity for certain musical textures as well as personalities: from Gustav Mahler to Brian Eno, Alva Noto to Franco Battiato, and Teho Teardo & Blixa Bargeld to Georges Ivanovic Gurdjieff."

"With his Cité Radieuse Charles-Edoard Jeanneret-Gris, better known as Le Corbusier, was simply the gravitational field where everything started."

"The inhabitants of the same building live just a few centimetres away from each other, separated by a simple partition wall, and share the same spaces whose pattern is repeated on each floor. They do the same things at the same time: turn on the tap, switch on the light, set the table, a few dozen synchronized lives which are repeated on floor after floor, from one building after another, from one street to the next."

"Like an anthropologist or an archeologist, I wandered discreetly around the Unité d’Habitation de Marseille to observe the lives of individuals, families and groups which are still unfolding in the radiant city."