Domiziano Maselli / Tommaso Rolando :: Enjoy Country Music (Torto Editions)

After collaborating on the live renditions of Maselli’s galvanic Lazzaro (Opal Tapes, 2021), Domiziano Maselli and Tommaso Rolando team up again on the cryptically titled Enjoy Country Music, out on cassette and digital on Torto Editions (Rolando’s own label).

Metallic objects thrown into a nuclear bunker

After collaborating on the live renditions of Maselli’s galvanic Lazzaro (Opal Tapes, 2021), Domiziano Maselli and Tommaso Rolando team up again on the cryptically titled Enjoy Country Music, out on cassette and digital on Torto Editions (Rolando’s own label). The album was recorded in the winter of 2022 in a large warehouse filled with microphones and two large speakers, and this recording setup plays a major role in the record, rising to the same importance as Rolando’s double bass and Maselli’s modular synths.

Writing about how a room can be marked with meaning in his Poetics of Space, French philosopher Gaston Bachelard cites an episode of Henri Bosco’s Malicroix where a house is besieged by a storm. When the protagonist had first entered the deserted family home, the silence of its vast rooms had anguished him, as “There is nothing like silence to suggest a sense of unlimited space.” But the sounds and forces that come and go with the storm—the howling wind, the shutters and doors cracking and slamming, the chimney bugling—give the building a new identity, they make it a real place.

Silence also opens the record with “Inandiare” (Genoese for “to start, to kick off”) and, in time, a swarming drone slowly and uniformly takes the stage, like a storm approaching, until double bass swirls appear and start quickly circling around it. Parts of the swarm take the shape of a string ensemble, and soon the line between the soloist, the accompaniment (synths? tape effects? natural distortion?), and the reverberation is blurred. Small details with their own temper keep emerging and disappearing back into the squall. As elsewhere in the album, the main focus is the matter of sound itself, bouncing off hard walls, saturating the air in the room.

A different approach ::

The pair “From the River” and “To the Sea” shows a different approach. They both feature plucked double bass solos (a tentative, jazzy line in the first, and a couple ostinatos with variations in the second), complemented by the heady sound of the space. The reverb is mixed in and out of the track, as if the warehouse itself was changing shape and dimensions around the instrument, and the feedback progressively moves towards the red until it sounds like a distorted, down-tuned guitar taking over the melodies. Similarly, the three fragments of “Static, or the perception of God” hone in on the feedback and raunchy reverb, morphing between a photorealistic chainsaw in the distance, gale through a rocky gorge, and metallic objects thrown into a nuclear bunker.

If some of the cavernous guitar-like tones throughout the album are reminiscent of Sunn O))) or early Earth, the use of noise is closer to Ben Frost’s or Tim Hecker’s grittiest works: it is no accident nor an added texture, but imparts the rest with its own meaning. On the other hand, the specific use of this recording place brings to mind another recent album playing on the natural acoustics of large post-industrial spaces – ‘The love it took to leave you’ (Invada, 2024), where Colin Stetson’s saxophones are caught in the act of flooding and almost demolishing a former foundry. However, in “Enjoy Country Music,” no single instrument or performer is a protagonist, opting for a deeper sense of abstraction and obscurity—and this is one of its biggest strength.

The closer, “Vìola” (“it violates”), is a desolate landscape with a repeating metallic pluck (soon saturated with feedback of course) and the bleak pace of a percussive element – a hand hitting the wooden body of the instrument, maybe. Silence regains territory and starts re-establishing its rule, but, to cite Bachelard again, “A house that has been experienced is not an inert box.” The silent room is not empty now, a mark has been left.

Enjoy Country Music is available on Torto Editions. [Bandcamp]