HYPERBAROQ – Tripudiis Sonis Variis
Released 2 October 2026, via CD and digital
Mirko Guerrini - piano, soprano sax, Chinese flute, moseño, duduk, chalumeau, synth, sound art
Ilaria Crociani - voice
Stephen Magnusson - electric guitars, moog guitar
Melbourne trio HYPERBAROQ bring centuries-old music into direct dialogue with the present on Tripudiis Sonis Variis, a striking new album that reimagines works by Monteverdi, Scarlatti, Carissimi, Strozzi, Purcell and others through jazz improvisation, electronics and sound art.
Led by Italian-Australian multi-instrumentalist and composer Mirko Guerrini, with vocalist Ilaria Crociani and acclaimed guitarist Stephen Magnusson, HYPERBAROQ approaches baroque repertoire not as something to be preserved behind glass, but as living material: music open to interpretation, transformation and the individual voice of the performers.
At the centre of the project is the baroque concept of the affetti: music as a direct and uninhibited expression of human emotion. Ornamentation and interpretation were fundamental to the music of the period, providing HYPERBAROQ with a natural bridge to the language of improvisation. Across the album, acoustic instruments meet loops, synthesisers, electric guitar, sound art and a remarkable palette of winds, including duduk, chalumeau, Chinese flute and Bolivian moseño.
“Baroque composers built in the expectation of ornamentation, of a performer’s own voice shaping the piece in real time,” the group explains. “That’s basically what improvisation is.” The album’s title has an extraordinary history. Tripudiis Sonis Variis — loosely translated as “a jubilation of varied sounds” — comes from a 1504 medical treatise by physician Gaspare Torella, in which music was prescribed as a defence against plague. For a project that emerged during Melbourne’s pandemic lockdowns, the discovery carried an uncanny resonance: five centuries apart, music offered the same possibility of consolation, connection and renewal.
HYPERBAROQ itself began during lockdown. After a walk through the fog one evening, Guerrini and Crociani returned home and sat at the piano with Giacomo Carissimi’s 1664 cantata No, no, non si speri, having heard Teresa Berganza’s recording earlier that day. Its stark refrain - a world in which hope seemed extinguished - resonated deeply with the uncertainty surrounding them. That encounter became the beginning of six years of research, experimentation, conversation and performance.
“Baroque music was talking to us in a profoundly direct, human-to-human way,” they recall. “Music written through a century marked by pestilence and wars was talking to us with exceptional clarity about our emotions in our own period of global uncertainty.” The resulting ten-track album travels across centuries, countries and musical traditions. The opening Stella caeli extirpavit, an ancient plague hymn, places computer-generated sound alongside Moog guitar, Chinese and Bolivian flutes. Alessandro Scarlatti’s O cessate di piagarmi is treated like a jazz standard, its form opened for spontaneous interpretation, while Monteverdi’s haunting Lamento della ninfa moves from dense electronics into an exposed acoustic world.
Elsewhere, Antonio Cesti’s Disserratevi abissi reveals an unexpectedly propulsive rhythmic character; Raffaello Rontani’s Caldi sospiri ch’uscite dal core slips towards something resembling Brazilian chorinho; and the medieval Galician song Ai ondas que eu vin veer carries an ancient expression of longing into a landscape of electric guitar and electronics.
One of the album’s emotional centres is Barbara Strozzi’s Che si può fare. The only female composer represented on the record, Strozzi occupies an important place in the group’s exploration of musical history. HYPERBAROQ strip the piece back to a dark, spacious arrangement, with Guerrini’s duduk answering Crociani’s voice as the recurring question “What can be done?” becomes an expression of despair that feels startlingly contemporary.
For Guerrini and Crociani, both born and musically formed in Florence before establishing new lives in Australia, Tripudiis Sonis Variis also represents a return to their own histories. Reconnecting with Italian language, repertoire and musical sensibility has allowed them to hear that material anew through decades spent immersed in jazz, improvisation and Australia’s multicultural music community. In Magnusson they found, as they describe him, “the perfect travel companion,” whose poetic approach to improvisation helps the music move freely between its historical origins and an entirely contemporary sound world.
The album ultimately asks a simple question: how much does human feeling really change across five centuries? Longing, grief, desire, fear and joy recur throughout Tripudiis Sonis Variis, regardless of whether their melodies were written in the thirteenth century, the seventeenth century or transformed in a Melbourne studio in 2026. HYPERBAROQ’s answer is not to reconstruct the past, but to enter into conversation with it.
“We hope people walk away with the sense that human experience is not cut off across time,” the trio says, “that longing, desire, grief and joy sound remarkably similar whether they were written in 1660 or felt last week.”
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Recorded and mixed by Guus Hoevenaars at Newmarket Studios, Naarm, Melbourne, VIC, Australia.
Mastered by Steve Garden, Auckland, Aotearoa, New Zealand.
Artwork by Ilaria Crociani and Mirko Guerrini.
Cover photo by Ilaria Crociani. Artists' portraits by Mirko Guerrini, Sarah Lee, Roger Mitchell and Ross Green.
Mirko Guerrini is a D’Addario Artist.
Stephen Magnusson plays Matheas Guitars.
Produced by Mirko Guerrini and Ilaria Crociani.
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HYPERBAROQ is a Melbourne-based ensemble featuring Mirko Guerrini, Ilaria Crociani and Stephen Magnusson, reimagining early and Baroque repertoire through improvisation, electronics and contemporary sound art.
Born in Florence, Guerrini studied piano, saxophone and classical composition at the Conservatorio Cherubini before studying jazz saxophone with Dave Liebman in New York. Across more than 20 albums as leader and over 50 as a sideman, he has collaborated with artists including Stefano Bollani, Enrico Rava, Billy Cobham and Caetano Veloso. Since relocating to Australia in 2013, he has composed for projects including Melbourne Museum’s Aztecs exhibition and the Venice Film Festival-selected VR film The Passenger, and currently teaches at Monash University.
Florence-born vocalist Ilaria Crociani studied piano and alto saxophone before initially pursuing a career in law. Returning to music, she performed throughout Tuscany and at festivals including Umbria Jazz before moving to Melbourne, where singing became the centre of her creative practice. Her releases include the ABC Jazz-commissioned Connecting the Dots, and she has performed regularly with Paul Grabowsky, Tony Gould and other leading Australian musicians.
Stephen Magnusson is one of Australia’s most distinctive improvising guitarists. A winner of the National Jazz Award at Wangaratta and the Melbourne Prize for Outstanding Musician, his extensive career has included collaborations with Charlie Haden, Sinéad O’Connor, Meshell Ndegeocello, Enrico Rava and Archie Roach.
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1. Stella caeli extirpavit (Anonymous, 13th century)
The album opens with electronics before the piano arrives at the end and quietly looks back at where all this came from, aware that what we are doing is simply a continuation. Stephen uses a Moog guitar to build drones, a modern echo of the ostinato found in Gregorian chant, while ancient Chinese and Bolivian flutes sit alongside it. Folk instruments from opposite sides of the world meeting computer-generated sound to perform an eight-hundred-year-old chant is the whole album in miniature: proof that this transversal way of listening, across time and culture, is the actual concept behind everything we made.
2. O cessate di piagarmi (Alessandro Scarlatti, 1683)
We treat this one exactly like a jazz standard: a simple lead sheet that lets us read it differently every single time we play it. It is a song about unrequited love, in which the singer begs the ungrateful eyes of the beloved to stop wounding them with a beauty they cannot resist. Because it barely needs anything added, we let that simplicity guide us, changing shape from night to night while the melody remains completely recognisable.
3. Lamento della ninfa (Claudio Monteverdi, 1638)
Heavy electronics carry the first half, before the second half turns fully acoustic, as if the track itself is walking back through time. But the real force at the centre of this piece is Ilaria's voice, pure, free of the usual vocal jazz mannerisms, guiding the listener through it the way Virgilio guides Dante. This is also the piece that left us speechless, quite literally. When we walked back into the control room after recording it, and the playback ended, none of us said a word for a long time. Monteverdi's grieving, wandering nymph still has that effect.
4. Disserratevi abissi (Antonio Cesti, 1655)
A ska song, written four hundred years ago (!), even if Cesti never would have called it that. This dramatic invocation, the singer calling on the depths themselves to open, gave us the chance to bring real rhythmic bounce and urgency into music this old, proof that the theatrical energy Cesti wrote into it in 1655 still has somewhere unexpected to go.
5. Che si può fare (Barbara Strozzi, 1664)
As the only female composer on this record, Strozzi's presence is a deliberate choice, reflecting how rare it was for a woman's genius to be recognised in her time. This is our favourite piece to play live. We kept the arrangement deliberately minimal and daunting, capturing the immobility of a depressive state. The lyrics, built around the repeated questions "What can be done?" "What can be said?" make this the epitome of despair. The duduk speaks Strozzi's centuries-old language, aching and resigned, carrying the melody like a second voice trapped in the dark.
6. Music for a While (Henry Purcell, 1692)
Despite the modern textures surrounding it, we play this piece almost exactly as Purcell wrote it. The song delivers the ancient idea of music as medicine—a concept of music therapy for mental and physical wellbeing that goes as far back as Pythagoras. With its central message that “music shall all your cares beguile,” the piece acts as a spell cast to soothe and trick the mind out of its grief. It required very little from us beyond trust, so we deliberately step back here, letting a three-hundred-year-old melody do exactly what it was designed to do: heal.
7. No, no, non si speri (Giacomo Carissimi, 1664)
This is where the whole project began. Late one night during Melbourne's Covid lockdown, after a walk in the fog, we sat at the piano with this cantata, having just heard a recording of it by Teresa Berganza. Something about it would not let us go. "Leave every hope. Hope is dead": four-hundred-year-old lyrics describing exactly what the world, and we too, were experiencing during the pandemic. Six years later, Stephen's playing here is some of the most beautiful on the record, and the chalumeau pulls us back centuries while sitting completely at home in this context.
8. Caldi sospiri ch'uscite dal core (Raffaello Rontani, 1614)
Our dear Florentine composer Raffaello Rontani gets a rhythm here that almost turns into a Brazilian chorinho. Its title translates roughly as warm sighs escaping the heart, and that tenderness stays intact even as the groove underneath it pulls the piece somewhere Rontani could never have imagined, a small reminder of how far this repertoire can travel without losing what made it beautiful in the first place.
9. Ai ondas que eu vin veer (Martim Codax, 14th century)
All electronics and electric guitar here, with Ilaria's voice bridging listeners across nine centuries. The oldest secular voice on the record, a Galician song of worrying for someone out at sea, comes from outside Italy and outside the Baroque period altogether, medieval rather than Baroque, but carrying exactly the same ache.
10. Have you seen but a white lily grow? (Robert Johnson, 1615)
This one sounds like a thoroughly modern jazz ballad, harmonically and melodically, which took us by surprise, given it was written four hundred years ago. We made only the smallest intervention on the harmony, because Robert Johnson had already written something contemporary on its own terms. We recorded it at the end of a long day, exhausted, studio dark outside. Nine takes in, still not right. On one, you can hear Ilaria say: "No, we can't get it right, we'll try again tomorrow." Then Guus (the sound engineer) came through on the foldback: "Come and listen to the first take." He was right.