The sleeve’s artwork tells us everything we need to know here. Paolo Spaccamonti is known as a film score composer and avant-garde musician, so I was on alert for something artistic, different and creative.
The eleven pieces take us to different places in Spaccamonti’s mind. It’s like being in a dream world. Each piece conjures up different shapes and images. Being instrumental, there’s a built-in solitude, but especially as a specialist in film, Spaccamonti exploits this and creates suggestive layers of sound. “Rimettiamoci le maschere” has a repetitive beat to it, but the hypnosis it creates stands next to cosmic waves and gradually we are swept away and floating along to who knows where. None of this is going to shock us. Rather it’s like a gentle massage with suggestive tones. Here and there I heard a little post rock from Spaccamonti’s guitar. So it is on “Paul dance”, but then the percussion could come from a Kraftwerk album. The guitar plays a tantalising tune. The calm and misty atmosphere is broken by the short and violent “Fumo Negli Occhi”. Such is the tension that I expected to hear the sound of breaking glass. The contrasts are amazing and cleverly handled. Behind the ringing post rock guitar statements of “Tutto bene quel che finistre” is a crumbling industrial sound distortion. It’s like a meteor shower in musical form. There’s no explanation, which makes it more intriguing of course. The longest piece is “Luce”, a lingering atmospheric piece which creates a vision of gloom but at the same time a slow journey through space. The sound transforms into minimalistic drone, as if we are now floating in space. “Diagonal” then plods along with its dreamy guitar tune, monotonous heartbeat and by now familiar cosmic background.
As experimentation in sound and music go, this is a strange and interesting collection. If I were to compare this to anything, I’m hearing Sunn O)))’s “Life Metal”, blended with something like an early Kraftwerk album but with guitars. But that’s the extreme side of this. Spaccomonti’s light and dark ambient soundscapes conjure up a range of dream-like images. Experimental art in musical form is alive and well.
(7.5/10 Andrew Doherty)
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