Giovanni Di Domenico & Rutger Zuydervelt
1. Painting a Picture
2. Picture a Painting
lp/dl/stream on Moving Furniture Records
June 2025
Order here
“I did this piano/Rhodes recording, played live, without overdubs. I believe your approach to sound could match very well these tracks….”
That’s how Giovanni Di Domenico’s collaboration with Rutger Zuydervelt started, though the first seeds were planted when the duo did a short live improv together in 2019, and Giovanni joining Hydra Ensemble on stage in 2022.
Painting a Picture / Picture a painting is -as the title suggest- an album of two long-form pieces, swapping the working method for each - one takes Giovanni’s recordings and has Rutger processing and adding to it, while the other one started with Rutger creating its foundation (with manipulated sounds of the first piece), and Giovanni building upon it. This resulted in two meandering tracks that are clearly linked, like two sides of the same coin.
The cover, a painting of an empty canvas, is made by Christiaan Kuitwaard. A beautiful and ultimately fitting visual addition to this mysterious release.
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Cover art by Christiaan Kuitwaard
Reviews
Vital Weekly
Let’s assume Rutger Zuydervelt needs no introduction. His work, either under his Christian name or as Machinefabriek, has been reviewed many times since 2006, easily more than 100 times. He recorded much of his work with others, even though that seems to have become much less in recent years. For this LP, he works with Giovanni di Domenico, born in Rome in 1977 and living in Brussels. According to the information “he shares with many of the musicians he has crossed paths with recently, of which we could enumerate Nate Wooley, Chris Corsano, Arve Henriksen, Jim O’Rourke, Akira Sakata, Alexandra Grimal, Tetuzi Akiyama, Manuel Mota, David Maranha, Norberto Lobo, Helena Espvall, Okkuyng Lee or Toshimaru Nakamura.” (bit of an odd sentence, I think). He plays the piano and Fender Rhodes and sent Zuydervelt some of his recordings. They know each other from a short live improvisation they did in 2019 and Di Domenico joining the Hydra Ensemble (of which Zuydervelt is a part) in 2022. With the recordings came the note that Di Domenico thinks there is a similar approach to creating music, and would Zuydervelt be interested in working with these sounds? Zuydervelt was and also reversed the roles, with Di Domenico receiving some sounds. Hence, the title, ‘Painting a Picture / Picture a painting’, is a mirror. This release has two long pieces, one by each composer, but it’s unclear who did what. In ‘Painting A Picture’, the piano has a central position and electronic shimmer in the best Brian Eno/Harold Budd tradition. Zuydervelt works sparsely with electronics, only later on bowing strings on his guitar. On ‘Picture A Painting’, the balance is more fifty-fifty, the piano taking a slightly sparser role, and the electronics being more on par. Overall, this is also a more abstract piece, with piano notes played sparsely, while on the other more repeating and melodic. It’s pretty different pieces, excellently completing each other. From the stylish ambient music on the first side to the more modern composition approach on the second. This is an excellent album.
Salt Peanuts
Italian, Brussels-based pianist-keyboard player Giovanni Di Domenico and Dutch sound artist (and graphic designer) Rutger Zuydervelt (aka Machinefabriek) played together a short, live free improvisation in 2019. In 2022, Di Domenico joined the chamber quartet Hydra (in which Zuydervelt played electronics) on stage.
Di Domenico and Zuydervelt’s debut duo album Painting a Picture / Picture a Painting features two extended pieces corresponding to each other. Di Domenico played the piano and the Fender Rhodes live on the first piece, «Painting a Picture», with no overdubs, and asked Zuydervelt to add electronics and process his sounds. This is a minimalist, atmospheric-ambient piece in which Zuydervelt’s subtle electronics and nuanced processing inject a dream-like, contemplative dimension. Zuydervelt’s «Picture a Painting» has its foundation in the manipulated sounds of «Painting a Picture», and later Di Domenico played over his own manipulated and processed sounds. It soars into deeper and darker ambient space, with Di Domenico’s sparse and minimalist, lyrical piano touches, slowly gaining more substance.
These two meandering pieces act like two sides of the same coin and complement each other. The cover artwork of Dutch visual artist Christiaan Kuitwaard solidifies the corresponding essence of this album.
Chain DLK
This is a collaboration that doesn’t shout “Look what we made!” so much as whisper, “Listen to what was already there”. "Painting A Picture / Picture A Painting" is a two-track, vinyl-length whisper between two sonic artisans who’ve each spent decades crafting beauty from nuance, subtle friction, and the gentle blurring of form.
It starts with a seed: Giovanni Di Domenico, Roman-born, Brussels-based pianist with a well-worn passport of free improvisation and collaborative cross-pollination, sends Rutger Zuydervelt (known for his work as Machinefabriek) a series of live piano and Rhodes recordings. No overdubs, just fingers and keys and time. “I believe your approach to sound could match very well these tracks…” he writes. Rutger responds not with words, but with texture, deconstruction, reinterpretation. Like placing a mirror under a mirror and watching recursion bloom.
The first piece, “Painting A Picture”, lays this process bare: Giovanni’s tactile, searching performance is caressed, crumpled, and ghosted by Rutger’s subtle manipulations. It’s like watching a reflection try to remember the face it mimics - everything’s slightly off, but poetically so. The Rhodes hums like a submerged choir, while glitchy textures curl around the sustain pedal’s footprints. It’s music that exists just between now and not-quite-yet.
The second piece, “Picture A Painting”, flips the equation. Rutger sets the stage with a sonic environment conjured from echoes of the first track - and then Giovanni enters, not with dominance but with a sort of patient humility. His playing here is more restrained, almost hesitant at times, like he’s brushing pigment onto ice. Every note feels like a decision. Every silence, a brushstroke held midair. There’s a sense that the two are no longer collaborating across time and layers, but in the same room - dreaming together with different palettes.
A nod here to the cover artwork: Christiaan Kuitwaard’s painting of a blank canvas is a bold and elegant metaphor. Not emptiness, but "possibility". Fitting, too, for a label like Moving Furniture Records - a place where minimalism, drone, and silence get up, stretch, and rearrange the sonic furniture when no one’s watching.
And it’s funny - for music so abstract and gentle, "Painting A Picture / Picture A Painting" doesn’t fade into the background. It invites stillness, yes, but also attention. It’s the sound of two artists erasing the borders between composition and improvisation, piano and process, self and other. It’s like watching a duet between a painter and their memory of a painting.
Verdict: This is music for listeners who like their beauty slow, their collaboration deep, and their metaphors wrapped in silence. A record that doesn’t show off, but rewards repeated viewings - or listenings - like a canvas that only reveals its real image under moonlight.
Etherreal (translated from French)
A classic format for collaboration between two individually prolific artists, the idea of starting with a piece written by one and worked on by the other, and then vice versa, finds a new expression with 'Painting A Picture / Picture A Painting'. From this title and the fact that each side of this LP contains only a single track, we had, moreover, an indication of this mirrored work proposed by Giovanni Di Domenico (whom we rediscover a year after having already reported on a collaborative work) and Rutger Zuydervelt.
A few piano bars, provided by the Italian, emphatic and melodic, open 'ainting A Picture', quickly joined by small electronic contributions and other treatments served by Zuydervelt. Almost spontaneous, the keyboard lines find an interesting link with the electronic components, more serious and crackling, offering a sort of sonic extension, beginning with the resonance of the piano and even inviting it to repeat some of its motifs. In such a context, micro-sequences of notes even raise questions about their origin (acoustic or electronic?), clearly reflecting the interaction between the two musicians.
Turning the record over, we move on to 'Picture A Painting', which begins with birdsong and elaborate layers, arranged by Rutger Zuydervelt. Di Domenico's piano enters somewhat hesitantly, laying down a few clumsy notes, helping to create an atmosphere that's far less light than on side A. Here, the mood becomes more ominous (a solitary, repeated note, various rustling sounds, the breath of a wind instrument in the distance) until the Italian's piano becomes less constrained in its playing, with rapid, tremolo-like strokes, again very well supported by the electronics, whose intervention further shortens the intervals between two notes. In the last quarter of the piece (certainly denser and therefore more convincing than the first), the entire instrumentation is enriched, in a form of positive and gripping escalation.
hhv mag (translated from German)
In an interview, the Italian improvisational artist, pianist, and composer Giovanni Di Domenico once quoted a line from a Steely Dan song that he fondly remembers: "sharing the things we know and love with those of my kind." As a declared fan of artistic collaborations with like-minded individuals, he seeks them out wherever he can. Recently, he wrote to Dutch drone artist and experimental musician Rutger Zuydervelt, sending him piano sketches—and thought: Surely he could do something with them. He could.
Thus, a collaborative album was born, consisting of two full-length tracks, on which both take the first step. The principle of this record is that it couldn't have been completed without the other. Everything builds upon itself. On Painting A Picture, we hear Di Domenico's piano sketches for a quarter of an hour—reworked, deconstructed, and distorted by Zuydervelt. This gives them a seemingly infinite space, with its long, reverberating and croaking drones, where they can expand and breathe.
On "Picture A Painting," however, the Dutchman begins his interpretation of the track, shifting the tempo, generously extending the sounds, and allowing Di Domenico to add his own mutation of the piano sounds. One track, two perspectives – it's worth listening to both. They make very good arguments.
