Without knowing anything about Aldinucci’s relationship to religion, his reenactment of its length and breadth on Spazio Sacro evokes feelings of both wonder and dread.
As evident to anyone who enjoyed the dazzling monochromes of Aer, recently exhaled on Dronarivm, Giulio Aldinucci is a seal with a beach ball at balancing field recording, ambient, minimalist composition and musique concrète.
On Spazio Sacro, Aldinucci wrestles with the concept and how it comes into being through the actions of mere mortals. Sacred space has always required demarcation, a circle of stones or colonnade of pillars or soaring vaults, capable of containing something “else.” This does not necessarily mean the space must have a walls or a roof, as Aldinucci amply demonstrates with “Mountain”—after all, Moses met his maker in the most desolate of unbuilt landscapes. In Jewish terms, the creator himself is known as Ha-Makom—“the place,” wherever he may be. And isn´t it the very nature of ambient-inflected music to conjure such spaces, both in the air and in our minds? An emotional, unambiguous space.
Aldinucci has collected sounds from churches and cathedrals, from isolated ruins and packed processionals and the seemingly least holy venues, and offered them on the altar of his own memories from growing up in a small village in Tuscany, where the rites of the Roman-Catholic Church continue to mark the rhythm of the year. Nevertheless, his is very much a “built” landscape, expanding and contracting, very specific and very universal, very expected and very unexpected. A choir rises and recedes. On “Sator,” what could be a rush of cold air through a corridor or a field of wheat blasts like a pipe organ. Spaces both confined and endless are defined, silent prayer cycles above the waves of “Come un immenso specchio d’inverno” and watch themselves in their fractured reflections, and another organ pipe blast makes the walls of “The Liquid Room” bulge outward. Throughout, footsteps drag, over dirt roads and cobblestones, fording streams or traipsing through airports, like a procession of time-traveling penitents. The bell clang heard until now only by the lonely goatherd transsubstantiates into the bustle of city traffic.
Without knowing anything about Aldinucci’s relationship to religion, his reenactment of its length and breadth on Spazio Sacro evokes feelings of both wonder and dread.
Spazio Sacro is available on Time Released Sound. [Bandcamp]
