(November 2009) Italy’s Glacial Movements label may be a relative newcomer to the ambient netherworld, but a slow but steady infusion of releases from the likes of Rapoon and Lull, and the promise of more in the offing from experimental ambient veterans such as Thomas Köner and Francisco Lopez, have given GM a strong foothold in darkly drifting musical terrain. And with Cloudlands GM capo Alessandro Tedeschi has allied himself again with a heavyweight, namely Italian mystic-ambient-space-drone maven, Oophoi. It’s that Prince of Audio-Tides whose communings with little known experimentalist, Enrico Coniglio, are here gathered under the name Aquadorsa. Of Oophoi enough should be known already, but it’s Coniglio’s contribution – his bringing of digital turbulence to Gasparetti’s more naturalistic sea of tranquility – that allows Cloudlands to stand that bit apart from the ambient space crowd, whether sprinkling pebbly gravel over crystalline contours or peppering pops and prepared piano patter over languorous lulls.
So, what might this portend, beyond a passing interest in post-digital music technology? Coniglio’s ‘research’ is said to be “increasingly focused on the relationship between ‘music’ and ‘landscape,’ seeking to represent the contemporary crisis of the territory, the loss of nature and identity of places, and the unknown on the evolution of post-urban and post-industrial territory.” So that’s your interpretive paradigm for you. No simple glum gloom-fest nor vacuous lightside languish, but a Zeitgeist-pondering meditation, with a plentiful palette of guitars, synthesizers, piano, percussion, waterphone, chimes, singing bowls, Theremin, and samples pressed into service. “A Pillow of Clouds” sets the tone, deploying a pinch of post-dub digital to etiolate its synth washes, while a processed reed-sound is delicately exposed amid swathes of vaporous synthesis, before an insistent pulse drives the whole towards the end. Similarly paradigm-mixing, “Daylight Fading into Evening Silence” hosts a wave-like cycling synth loop washing over and over, digital crepitations creeping in, heralding Raster Noton-lite glitch-rhythmics. Nocturnal singing-bowl hum consorts with chimes and wisps over “Zero Gravity,” as a ghostly loop cedes to looming syn-throb, detuned percussion and steely sine-shafts. “Syhan” goes further, with its skeletal slow-mo beats and veiled vocal fragment conspiring to lead winsome piano thematics and crystalline atmospherics far from the path of ambient purism. Aquadorsa’s is a combo of bliss and bitcrush, it occurs, not far removed from 12k’s pop-microsound, though on the unquiet “Alone in the Rising Fog” the duo serves up a slew of slithery and spooked atmospherics suggestive of fog-bound disorientation – cloud lands nearer to Köner country and Roach worlds.
All in all, eschewing standard dark isolationist void-starings and smile-on-the-cosmos New Age fluff alike, Aquadorsa’s is at once a more expansive aerial view (cf. Oophoi’s release on GM’s Wurm series, An Aerial View), while cosying up to the glitch-click aesthetic. Cloudlands reveals itself to be far from the bleak and parsimonious monodrone of much enmired in the midden of the minimal, or draped in cartoon Dark; rather it is a subtly teeming affair of strata and substrata, of stately airs and grace attractively mottled by a mezzotint of microsound.
Cloudlands is out now on Glacial Movements. [Listen & Purchase]
