Indian Wells - No One Really Listens to Oscillators (2022)

Introspective, engaging, electronic music exploring the concept of “unfinished” in relation to oneself, art, architecture and surroundings

‘No One Really Listens To Oscillators’ is the gloriously titled new album by Indian Wells, the project of producer Pietro Iannuzzi from southern Italy. The nine track album is set for release on 15th July 2022 on Max Cooper’s Mesh imprint. Tackling issues of a sense of incompleteness and societal conformities .

The album’s initial conceptual input came from an article in The New York Times referencing a new conceptual architectural style. The term “Incompiuto” (Unfinished) which was theorized by Alterazioni Video & Fosbury Architecture and concerned unfinished works that reveal the inability of projects to make infrastructures useful and sustainable for the community.

“The head of this article was a photo of an escalator in the middle of nowhere in Calabria, where I live,” explains Pietro. “I knew this escalator very well and I immediately realized that my perception of this "reality" could be really different from people who have never lived in this area. It can be said that I grew up in the unfinished - between unfinished houses and other half-built works that are now an integral part of the landscape, without really noticing. In reality, our experience is influenced by everything that surrounds us and this context shapes us to make us live a distorted reality, which we very quickly get used to.”

“Before I started to create this album, I cleared my mind,” says Pietro. “I went back to when I fell in love with electronic music and listened to Radiohead’s Kid A and Amnesiac, Warp artists like Boards of Canada and Aphex Twin, Border Community, William Basinski, Massive Attack. I felt my last album was unfinished, and realised something had to change in my music.”

‘No One Really Listens To Oscillators’ was the first track completed and gives the album its title. “I was spending a lot of time working on micro-changes on the oscillator frequency on the lead synth of the track,'' says Pietro. “After a couple of hours I asked myself “Who cares? Will people even notice this?” It’s a way to say that we have lost our ability to notice little things, to go deeper. To develop sensitivity.”

During the recording of the album, Pietro’s daughter was born in April 2020. “My daughter was born with Down Syndrome, which we didn't know anything about, so I started to study and understand how her life could be.” During Pietro’s research he discovered works by the American artist Judith Scott, who was born deaf and with Down Syndrome and read how her condition made her, in the eyes of society, an "unfinished" person. “I was struck by her beautiful and illegible works that are nothing more than pure and simple expression, an end to itself, with no other purpose.” The track ‘Life Of JS' is dedicated to her.

The album’s beautiful closing track ‘Before Life’ was created soon after discovering his wife was pregnant and starts with a recording of his daughter’s fetal heartbeat. “For me it is a hymn to creation, in a very broad sense. It’s written for my daughter. It’s hope.”

Indian Wells' latest body of work provides an intense and rewarding listen, it's a document of hope, resilience and deviance, technically and musically powerful yet rich with emotive concepts at it's core that provides insight into our inability at times to search deep only until called upon.

Indian Wells’ last album, 2017’s warmly received ‘Where The World Ends’, was supported by an array of tastemaker press (“Soaring euphoria” Mixmag Top 50 Albums of 2017, “Tender, pulsing techno” Resident Advisor, “A standout cut in the realm of emotive techno” XLR8R, “Techno with an artful, emotive edge” Clash, “A refreshing vision of club music” Electronic Sound, "The album simply glows" A Closer Listen) and standout track ‘Cascades’ received plays across BBC Radio (Gideon Coe, Huw Stephens, Jamz Supernova, Pete Tong, Phil Taggart, Tom Ravenscroft).

‘No One Really Listens To Oscillators’ is set for release on 15th July 2022 on LP and digital formats.