A single hour-long deep space navigation through a void not so much magnificent as downright angsty and alien.
Giuseppe Tillieci, aka Neel, has been a DJ and engineer for some time now, accruing a reputation as a mastering engineer behind the sound design of some of the more questing techno releases on the likes of Semantica, Prologue, Morphine, and Attic Music. With Donato Dozzy he produced one of the benchmark albums of late-period ambient dub techno (Voices From The Lake, 2012). His first solo outing, Phobos, curated by Editions Mego offshoot, Spectrum Spools, overseen by ex-Emerald, John Elliot, is drawn from the same ambient material that made up recent Neel live performances at both MUTEK (Montreal) and Atonal (Berlin) festivals. Something of a concept album, judging by a press release attributing Tillieci’s inspiration to an elaborate narrative concerning the eponymous Phobos, one of Mars’s two moons, which sets twice across the Martian sky each day, and each century draws closer to its red parent by one earthly meter, in a 50-million year gravitational tease that can only end in collision.
Phobos is situated, as a well judged blurb from SS has it: ‘…in between Nurse With Wound’s “Space Music” and Pete Namlook & Tetsu Inoue’s “Shades of Orion”: a gap between the cold, lifeless experimentations of Steven Stapleton—space heard as a largely silent void punctuated by the sudden and infrequent arrival of massive objects—and the romantic imaginings of 90’s space ambient which filled space with idealistic longings of earth.’ It might even be seen as a post-millennial European re-vision of the Romantic West Coast US 80s space music of the likes of Michael Stearns and Steve Roach. Ranging over the other end of the spectrum from VFTL’s aquatic and biotic orientation, with layers of patient frequency-filling detail, Phobos is a single hour-long deep space navigation through a void not so much magnificent as downright angsty and alien, palpably audible on “Life on Laputa Regio;” only on the final “The Secret Revealed” is there an outfolding of hitherto reined in tone and held back emotion, ending in ascent.
Phobos is available in November on Spectrum Spools.
