NOSTOI reveals Luca Bevacqua as an artist less concerned with composition in the traditional sense than with the shaping of the listening experience. The album aggressively resists passive listening; it asks to be inhabited, endured, even wrestled with. Host and parasite marry.
A dimensional collapsing environment
Luca Bevacqua’s NOSTOI, released on the sublime Evel Records, channels the abrasive noisescapes associated with artist such as Merzbow or Whitehouse, yet here we are moved by a very distinct method of dance. What unfolds then is not simply noise but a dimensional collapsing environment—vast, immersive, and necessarily demanding of the listener’s fullest attention.
To lean into this record is to accept a joyous disorientation. Comparisons to barren tundras or frozen landscapes feel almost too convenient; the terrain here is instead a stranger in a strange land and a more psychological propulsion to encounter. For those willing to commit to the journey, however, the payoff is simply exquisite. This is a music that arrives like a psychedelic transmission from a detuned analog television—black-and-white haze flickering between perception and abstraction.
Timing rarely settles. Melody has gone on a very long backpacking holiday. Conventional musical signposts are almost entirely absent — a highly deft skill for any musical venture for sure. In their place, tuning, texture and fragmentation become the articulating grammar of the piece. Collage and conundrum sit beside tension and release, building a structure that refuses routine musical logic should it attempt to propose commonality or semblance. The cumulative effect is startling: something so obfuscated, so extortionately removed from familiar forms, that it hints at the possible genesis of an entirely new sonic language previous unknown.
Cascading through cavernous underpasses ::
Hearing the record half-awake on a quiet morning only heightened its surreal qualities. In that liminal state it felt less like listening and more like being listened to. The basement of the Jungian self mirrored back through electrifying sound design. Glitch surfaces only to be glitched again; enduring drones stretch and fracture across the stereo field. Beats occasionally appear, cascading through cavernous underpasses lit by sodium arc lamps, echoing against graffiti-scarred walls in frozen towns. It is only in closing a treated piano appears as a Medicaid to help us find equilibrium.
Musical landscapes climb the walls. Pronoia briefly emerges from a collapsing would-be paranoia in an anti-zen liberating meltdown. Experience resembles art houses brimming with atonal kaleidoscopes—bewildering, confrontational, and strangely mesmerizing, where shimmers fracture all light, restless energy, dark and uneasy, propel hypnotic movement fucked into antigenical stasis.
In the end, NOSTOI reveals Luca Bevacqua as an artist less concerned with composition in the traditional sense than with the shaping of the listening experience. The album aggressively resists passive listening; it asks to be inhabited, endured, even wrestled with. Host and parasite marry. Within this beatific abrasion lies a strange clarity. What first appears chaotic slowly resolves into something deliberate and quietly visionary—an exploration of sound that feels less like a conclusion and more like the opening of the final Door to end all Seeking.
NOSTOI is available on Evel. [Bandcamp]
