Valerio Tricoli - Vixit (2019)

Valerio Tricoli commits his latest electro-acoustic masterpiece to Second Sleep, offering a steeply hypnagogic experience inspired by and employing the Intonarumori (Noisetuners) invented by Futurist pioneer Luigi Russolo.

The follow-up to Tricoli’s contemporary concrète classic, Miseri Lares (2014, PAN) keeps with the searching spirit of much great Italian experimental music, with an underlying appreciation of the occult and of mental and physical states undergoing alteration; between waking and dream life and the odd interstices between those dimensions or realities.

Vixit quite literally occupies analogue space - 1/4’ tape, analogue synthesisers, home-built instruments - channelling and organising its chaotic uncertainties into something tangibly detailed yet deeply, subconsciously elusive, representing something that exists beyond our peripheral hearing and experience of the everyday.

This material may be cleft from Russolo by a century, but, beyond the mere use of of the same instrument, it shares much of a mutual imagination for the abstract, the dreamlike, and the unknown in its surreal arrangements of ephemeral, phantasmic sound sources and aesthetics. The possibilities of the unknown held a great fascination for Russolo which is shared here by Tricoli in a subtle but apparent way that too many artists nowadays seem too cynical towards. The result is a highly absorbing, almost surreal listening experience that comes highly recommended to followers of Tricoli or those of you looking to get lost in a dense and dreamlike soundworld...