reface



Tomorrow morning the Pope will give his throaty, inaudible lower-case benediction to an eyes-welling with the sentiment of it all, reeling mostly-mad population, wild with dispassion for rhetorically rabid extra-ethical rights-to-"live or die, man"; morbid Schiavo-fest, car-wreck fascination with somebody else's mortality every hour on the hour in a way Wolfowitz could only hope (but doubtfully will) to rile for the belly-distended fourth-world sistren among us, and I am morbidly, critically unable to go out tonight and see people and see anybody shout their Gang of Four-influenced-influenced-influenced, 'Ubermensch-will-to-rock (eight miles high) Ego-pretending-to-be-Id' at me in yet another nightly peeps-the-spectacle night out in Brooklyn town. A friend of mine out west sent me Pirandèlo and I am no more in the mood for heady abstract electronica medium-is-the-message background escape artist soundskip-shit than I am to have the electro-clash fashion-ironists whose hedonism (at risk of sounding prudish and neurotic) tonight can only bore and depress and piss me off. I'm a moody motherfucker.

I'm better than I used ta be. I used to see ethics and politics in every formal construction, every line half-erased and every mash-up mashed as a (conscious or not) political choice, the politics of form in art enforcing or challenging this or that piece of common-sense wisdom (like the fella in those half-a-dozen dystopic sci-fi shorts who goes back in time, steps on a butterfly, and upon return finds we're living in a global dictatorship of the toddlers, wearing Scooby Doo Underoos on our heads, snorting vitamin-enriched mineral-crack-food for breakfast and the inner gizzards of our listening selves have become so puttied and pitiful that we all actually appraise Ashlee Simpson as dangerously confrontational and think The Killers are dangerous). Used ta.

Playing Pirandèlo in, admittedly, my dead-of-night "live or die, man" morbid inter-navel-gazing mood reminded me that much of the abstractions I once heartily loved (and still do, but with more tired distance) in electronic music were due not to their difficulty, not to their formal (political) resistance, not for their research-fetishistic detachment (i.e. escape-in-academic-disguise) from the world of community-based music, but because it is music that still has a palette. Perhaps it is due to what the tyranny of 'Repeatable Success In The Boardroom' marketing demographics do to half our music (and how it taints 20% of the remaining), cutting out 88.9% of our tongues and leaving us all with a musical language as button-pushing, mute and mercilessly ugly and insulting as the tract-house lives we tried to cure with DIY punk. Sometimes I want a music that has grown-up vocabulary enough to express something I can't with my diabetic-fit crunk-pose-prose; an emotional landscape I can't see three feet out but move through willingly anyway because it rings true to the way I feel my own endorphins.

Body and Conclusion
And now, in the fifth paragraph, you get to hear what Pirandèlo Suono sounds like. It sounds like that (see above).

Prologue
Pirandèlo is an Italian electro-acoustic multimedia group composed of musician/sound designer Andrea Gabriele, Marita Cosma (Writer/Photographer), and Claudio Sinatti (Filmmaker). My Italian is non-existent and the English information available is scant. As much as I can tell the musical portion of what is presented as an audio-visual project is primarily the domain of Gabriele, who composed Pirandèlo Suono with software, double bass, acoustic and electric guitars (though the palette here is weighted towards the acoustic), keyboards, turntables, field recordings, and vocals (on four songs). Gabriele is a busy man. In 1998 he created the Italian label/online art project/web label Tu'm, and one half of Mou, Lips! and is a coordinating member of several active Italian electronic music and art organizations. Mou, Lips! have collaborated and appeared alongside Janek Schaefer, Günter Müller, Werner Dafeldecker, and was recently featured on a Wire magazine compilation alongside Scanner, Kim Cascone, Radian and Richard Chartier, et al.

This is an absolutely gorgeous collection of nine top-shelf tracks that fuse the best elements of Fennesz (cf. Fennesz Plays, Endless Summer), Oval (cf. "Wohnton"), Mouse on Mars (cf. "Idiology", the non-dance tracks) and Microstoria (cf. all of it) with a touch of late Town & Country (and the vocals, on the few tracks they surface, are beautifully rendered and organic to the musical settings without being either obtrusive or needlessly processed). The music is comparable to recent offerings by Apestaartje, The Books, and Mitchell Akiyama in the way it fuses acoustic instrumentation, vocals, field recordings, and meticulous computer re-workings of all of the above into coherent, painterly, and emotionally resonant compositions. Even though the record possesses the compositional logic of computer music (focused on the 'event' in a non-linear, drifting, cracking and peeling sort of way) it is a successful creole of laptop and folk (as opposed to the run-of-the-mill "folktronica" sampling games that seem lately to be sneezed out every other day). This music happens in clouds and clusters. However it's not all processing and Gabriele frequently resolves to carefully composed music concrete or acoustic guitars and penny whistles backed faintly by the rushing of processed field recordings. The results feel absolutely natural. Mother-nature natural. Whispering-to-you-in-bed-and-remembering-the- evening-news-while-passed-out-and- reconstrutcing-it-all-the-next-morning-in-a-big-fictional-rant-of-a-record-review kind of natural. And if the music is not representative of the way we hear the world exactly (and maybe this is all I've been trying to say) it is remarkably emotionally evocative of the way we (I) feel it.

A beautiful release well worth the extra-time it will take to track down and order online.

[available in the United States via Praemedia.]