[reviews] afe056lcd
luca sigurtà: la vera macchina d'argento

Italian composer Luca Sigurtà (1976) has a strong interest in field recordings and found sounds. Before he self-released a couple of CD-Rs and a CD-Rom in collaboration with Manuele Cecconello and when playing live he uses laptop, CDs and electronica.

The title of his latest CD is best translated as the "The Real Silver Machine" (don't know if it relates to Hawkind). There is a whole bunch of stuff listed that was used to create this release, apart from the aforementioned field recordings: guitars, percussion, objects, self-built devices and broken discs.

For a reason not clear to me the volume is very soft, and apperentely one should play this very soft. I thought that the Lopezian trick was more for Lopez himself. Whatever Sigurtà is using for sound devices, he throws everything in the computer and creates three lenghty pieces of musique concrete-like music with it.

If you crank up the volume you will notice that his music is actual quite full, and not as empty as say Richard Chartier or Roel Meelkop, but rather a more ambient version of Thu20 or Boca Raton, with whom Sigurtà shares more similarities.

Although I must admit I thought this was a rather a nice disc, I must at the same also admit it wasn't a very original one. Much of microsounding microscopic microsounds have been reworked in pretty much similar ways by others, and execution wise this is certainly not a bad release, but not highly original either.

[Frans De Waard]