Lino Capra Vaccina - Antico Adagio (1978, Reissue 2014)

"There are records I have found in my life that I was almost wishing existed before hearing them." So writes Four Tet’s Kieran Hebden in the liner notes to this reissue of a rare piece from Italian percussionist/minimalist composer Lino Capra Vaccina. Hebden goes on to cite totemic albums like Alice Coltrane’s spiritual jazz masterpiece Journey to Satchidananda and Don Cherry’s world music forbearer Organic Music Society as these sorts of "idealized" concepts, adding Vaccina’s 1978 album Antico Adagio to that short list.
Out of print for decades, the punctilious Italian label Die Schachtel now reissues Vaccina’s debut album along with another half-hour of previously unheard compositions making for nearly 70 minutes of glorious, shimmering minimalism. It would not be remiss to think of Antico Adagio as the slightly more European cousin to Steve Reich’s flawless Music for 18 Musicians, taken with the infinite patterns that can be rendered from percussion and metallophones. In the past few years, there’s been a deluge of bell-like sounds—either acoustic or computer-generated—with producers like Four Tet, Caribou, Gold Panda, Jon Hopkins, and Pantha du Prince deploying them. It’s the kind of pure tone that serves as connection between a particular strain of American minimalism of the 1970s and modern electronic music, making extant the lineage between the two disciplines. So while this album will find fans of the former, those who favor the latter will also have such struck metal resonate.
Rather than the crack ensemble who performed Reich’s music, most of Antico Adagio is rendered by Vaccina alone, who is credited with vibraphone, marimba, tablas, darbuke, gong, cymbals, bells, metal sheets, tom, and snare. Smatterings of other sounds like oboe, violin and female voices also mix in and it never quite feels like the work of one lone drummer banging on metal. Carefully layering these voices, there are moments that bring to mind Gregorian chants and Tuvan throat singing, or when '60s psychedelic acts cast their voices in massive amounts of echo to suggest the blackness of deep space.
In the CD notes, Vaccina calls his approach to music-making "sound ecology," talking about how free improvised concerts in public spaces in the late 1960s and the examples of American minimalists Glass and Reich—the latter’s Drumming a touchstone—led him to the making of this album. Openers "Elegia" and "Voice in XY" most closely resemble Reich’s layers of percussion, which move from snowflake-contemplative to dizzying in a few minutes, the pulsing rhythms evoking visions of crystal lattices and the kinds of sprockets and clockworks one might have glimpsed in Hugo.
But the album does more than merely reflect the example of Reich, venturing from such resplendent, beautiful moments into darker, more gnarled terrain. On experimental pieces like "Chants of the Spheres" and "Fragments of Sleep", percussion mixes in with voice and the music more closely resembles the likes of This Heat and Pink Floyd’s "A Saucerful of Secrets". The careful pacing of the ten-minute title track moves with gentle grace. At some moments it reminds me of Pharoah Sanders’s Tauhid and jazz vibraphonist Bobby Hutcherson; at others of a Javanese gamelan performance in a royal court. But many times, Vaccina’s music sounds like something beyond your imagination.