Trickjumps
Trickjumps is Vorpalgaze’s first album, composed and mixed between October 2021 and the end of 2025 and mastered in 2026. The album explores the realms of IDM, computer music and experimental electronics, without strictly adhering to any specific genre. It consists of six dense tracks, each conceived as a passage through which the listener can transcend and move towards a higher level. The title may initially evoke the world of arcade video games, but its meaning actually refers to a deeper spiritual idea of transition and transformation.
Every timbre is designed in detail and given its own identity. Each sound develops throughout the piece, following its own path while interacting naturally with the other elements, creating a continuously evolving texture in which individual rhythmic and spectral identities remain distinct while closely interconnected. The result is a multilayered listening experience in which the listener can choose which sound to focus on. By the end of the piece, nothing remains quite as it was at the beginning and, as the album progresses, each track represents the next level.
In some pieces, as in “Trapsuutjie” and “Monkeywolf”, the structure is built around an algorithmically generated background that runs through the entire piece, with the rhythms and harmonies of each section adapted and woven into it. In other cases, as in “Vector” and “Laniakea”, the harmonic and melodic material consists of a single improvisation that was recorded and subsequently edited. In “Laniakea” in particular, the music alternates between forward and reverse sections, creating an abstract sense of movement that is perfectly conveyed by Franz Cardone’s artwork.
A sense of playfulness runs throughout all six tracks, intertwined with intensity and emotional tension, and is particularly evident in “Trickjump”. The 8-bit video game tunes draw the listener in while concealing where the music is heading, making its shifts in intensity and harmony difficult to anticipate. “Edge” was co-written with Shigaraki (Franz Cardone) and is the track that most fully embodies the idea of a threshold. It is the piece in which all the elements of Vorpalgaze’s artistic vision converge: a meticulous attention to timbre, the constant evolution of every sound, abstract and complex rhythms, emotional tension, and a distinct transition from the beginning to the end of the piece.
Tracklisting:
- Trapsuutjie
- Trickjump
- Edge (feat). Shigaraki
- Monkeywolf
- Vector
- Laniakea
Vorpalgaze
Vorpalgaze is the electronic music project of Italian composer Rossella Calella. Her work explores IDM and experimental electronic music through detailed sound design, rhythmic abstraction and shifting emotional tension, combining carefully structured processes with algorithmic complexity and unpredictability.
Her compositions have been selected and performed at international festivals and events including the International Computer Music Conference in Shenzhen, the Seoul International Computer Music Festival, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, MANTIS in Manchester, Atemporánea in Buenos Aires, ArteScienza in Rome and Futura in Crest. In 2022, she won the 16th National Prize of the Arts in Electronic Music and New Technologies, awarded by the Italian Ministry of University and Research.
The name Vorpalgaze takes its first word from Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem “Jabberwocky”, in which “vorpal” is an adjective describing the sword used to slay the Jabberwock.
Here, the word is turned towards the act of looking: the artist’s gaze upon the world is that of a neurodivergent young woman who holds eye contact for too long and rarely communicates emotion through facial expression yet possesses a vast and complex inner world that finds its way outward primarily through her music.
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