[reviews] afe109lcd
tiziano milani: im innersten

 
vital weekly []
newsletter, the netherlands, march 2009

Since many years I closely follow the work of John Hudak. In the early days it came on cassette and then on CD and CD-R. One thing has remained a constant factor in his music and that his interest to explore one theme per project. On cassette always two actually, one per side, but these days its one piece per CD/CD-R release. On "Miss Dove, Mr. Dove" he uses field recordings made in the Czech Republic, recording doves at dawn, while traffic and people on the street increases. These sounds are treated with some kind of unnamed software and the entire piece lasts an hour. "It is intended to be played as background sound/music", it says on the press release, and that's quite right. The music has changes, but throughout they are quite minimal, with envelopes on specific sounds being opened with great care. Music to be played while doing something - reading being my preferred kind of activity. Non-intentional music, the perfect back-drop. Like Satie intended with his music for furniture. Ambient music as Eno intended, but of a somewhat stranger kind. The bird like sounds are rhythmical, cut-up and not endlessly flowing. Very nice.

The name Tiziano Milani is a new name for me, although he has some releases on Setola di Maiale and Chew-Z. He has a passion for "collected" sounds, by which, I assume, the label means he does field recordings. He has built a reverberation room of which the details are on the cover. I must admit I didn't understand much of what he said about the music, but it seems to me that this is constructed by melting all these sounds together. He likes muffled sounds, far away, recorded through the walls. This results in three long tracks which work as endless streams of sounds, rather than a fixed composition of specific sounds. This makes it hard to focus on the end result - the composition - but like Hudak, it seems that its much more three pieces of undirected ambient music. Whereas Hudak limits his sound source to one specific recording, Milani works with a multitude of sounds, which move about on end, but the end result is like Hudak: music to do your newspaper reading, cleaning or just sit back and relax. Also nice, certainly if you play these in a row.

You could decide to end with the disc by Afe labelboss Andrea Marutti with someone I never heard of, Tommaso Cosco. He delivered the field recordings for "Turra", which are then processed by Marutti. Marutti has an extensive discography at hand in all sorts of music, but he is best known for his subtle dark drone music. This particular piece is no stranger in that land, as he regards it as his companion piece for his "The Subliminal Relation Between Planets", released by Nextera. Almost nineteen minutes of the deepest and darkest rumble around. It carries the listener away, but its over before you know it, and you land with a bump on earth again. This could have been easily twice the length.

[Frans de Waard]

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