Up to 23 :: An Apple A Day You Die Anyway (13/Silentes)

Released by 13/Silentes in a double limited vinyl edition, An Apple a Day You Die Anyway confirms the quality of a catalog that continues to intercept the most sensitive areas of Italian ambient and electronic research. And it confirms that Up To 23, now a trio, possesses a recognizable voice, capable of holding together vision and rigor, emotion and structure, darkness and momentum.

Capable of evoking repetition, erosion, loss of meaning

With its second chapter, Up To 23, the project born from Marco Buffetti and Francesco Fincato, takes on a broader, more vibrant, more fluid shape, thanks to the now steady presence of Enrico Coniglio. And this presence is immediately felt as a new inner breath within the album, as a current that changes the temperature of the entire landscape. An Apple a Day You Die Anyway comes after Hydor and seems to preserve its immersive vocation, yet it carries it into a more restless, more earthly zone, more exposed to the weight of the present. Where the debut pursued a natural element through its mutability, here the sound enters the forced rhythm of daily life, listens to the mental noise of the present, absorbs its weariness and returns it as vision.

The title is one that leaves a mark: it has a brutal, almost proverbial dryness, and within that corrosive formula the heart of the work is already there. The album moves along a borderline where the well being promised by the contemporary world reveals itself for what it so often truly is, an etiquette of survival, a set of proper gestures that save nothing, a discipline of adaptation that leaves the void untouched. Up To 23 takes this material and translates it into a highly refined sonic writing, capable of evoking repetition, erosion, loss of meaning, and at the same time a stubborn will to recover awareness, a spark, an inner opening.

This is where the album’s strength lies, in holding together a powerful narrative dimension and a musical quality that never sacrifices tonal depth. Its 80s lineages surface like a fully absorbed memory, never as a mere stylistic exercise. There is the memory of a certain kind of science fiction cinema, of electronic textures suspended between melancholy and prophecy, of a sensibility able to look at the future with wonder and dread at the very same moment. Yet everything is brought back into a personal language, sober, controlled, fully aware of the value of detail. The synthesizers sketch opaque horizons and oblique luminosities, the treated guitars suggest a human fragility that makes every passage less abstract, while the rhythmic programming hints at the impersonal beat of procedures, deadlines, and accumulating hours.

Knowing how to be dark without indulging in dullness ::

Within this balance lies one of the album’s most accomplished aspects. Its ambient nature never coincides with a decorative or contemplative idea. Here the environment is a field of tensions, a psychic theatre, an organism that breathes with the listener and sends back unsettling questions. The trio’s fluidity never results in passive relaxation. It produces, rather, a critical immersion. The album moves forward like a lucid dream crossed by distant alarms, like a drift through synthetic landscapes in which a question about concrete existence always remains lit, about the way we consume time, about the price we pay when we stop truly choosing.

Enrico Coniglio gives the work a precious atmospheric quality. His story as a composer attentive to soundscape, to the memory of places, to the porosity between acoustic phenomenon and perception, integrates naturally with the matrix of Up To 23 and helps the project mature toward a more complex breath. There is a discipline of feeling that allows the album to remain fully readable despite the richness of its stratifications. Every sound seems placed with patient measure, as though the whole album had been conceived to accompany a slow reemergence of sensibility.

An Apple a Day You Die Anyway possesses a rare quality, that of knowing how to be dark without indulging in dullness. Within its material there runs, in fact, a secret trust, a desire for restoration. The album looks straight at social automatism, fatigue, the serial nature of days, the cold that turns life into an administrative practice, yet it never yields to any aesthetic of surrender. It seeks a point of awakening. It seeks a possibility of presence. It seeks, above all, a sonic form capable of making perceptible once again the boundary between being in the world and being simply carried along. In this sense the work has something ethical about it, beyond its musical dimension.

Released by 13/Silentes in a double limited vinyl edition, the album confirms the quality of a catalog that continues to intercept the most sensitive areas of Italian ambient and electronic research. And it confirms that Up To 23, now a trio, possesses a recognizable voice, capable of holding together vision and rigor, emotion and structure, darkness and momentum. It is an album that leaves a long trace, one that does not end with the immediate listening, one that returns to make itself heard even later, when silence takes its place again in the mind of the listener. It is precisely then that one understands that this work does not merely tell of our time. It puts it to the test. It questions it. And in doing so it reminds us that living requires presence, risk, desire, and a subtle fidelity to what still makes us human.

An Apple A Day You Die Anyway is available on 13/Silentes. [Bandcamp]