[reviews] afe109lcd
tiziano milani: im innersten

Milani is an "acoustic architect" from Vercurago, a small town in the northern area of Italy characterized by the placid waters of Lecco's Lake, around which wonderful landscapes unfold.

I thought I'd mention this because, despite the myriads of occurrences typifying it, his music seems to reflect the calmness of a long walk in the country, perhaps along a river (or, why not, a lake…) barely broken by the minute incidences that insect life, or bird talking, introduce in the overall tranquillity.

Yet "Im Innersten" comprises many elements whose derivation is far from bucolic, their superimposition generated through complex processes that, in the composer's words, create "a continuous flux where all events coming from a different origin interact, so that each of them contains all the others in itself".

To realize these delightfully unsolved textures, a computer processed pre-amplified omnidirectional sources captured by a microphone in a reverberating room. This is not a typical ten-second-Lexicon-Hall album hiding absence of ideas, though. In this circumstance, we're satisfied by a sonic heterogeneity based upon familiar presences mildly enhanced by an intelligent use of electronics.

It's a quiet, but not boring series of electroacoustic interactions in which found sounds, electronic radiations and normal instruments generate an ear-rubbing cloth that appears trademarked by names such as Paul Schütze and Ralf Steinbrüchel, even if Milani successfully strives to maintain a trait of individuality.

A clever work, dappled that necessary much to prevent wearisomeness from kicking in, elegantly gratifying and - especially in the final track "From Order To Border" – causing interesting reactions in the mechanisms of memory.

[Massimo Ricci]