Rob Mazurek - Milan (2024)

Milan is the latest spellbinding stop-off on an intrepid solo voyage, with interdisciplinary abstractivist Rob Mazurek (Exploding Star Orchestra, Chicago Underground Duo, São Paulo Underground and Black Cube SP) dropping anchor in the regional capital of Lombardy to record the latest in his series of unaccompanied performances at radio stations throughout the world.

Infused with the cultural legacy of his striking environs, this musical Maqroll conjures “an architecture of energy”, his bespoke PolySonicTectonics set-up usurping the gigahertz at Radio Popolare, one of Italy’s oldest listener-supported radio broadcasters, to raise a one-man carnival of feverish ceremonial exorcisms from the enlightened smoulder of a reverent nothingness.

Trumpet, piano (played with the pedal permanently down), bells, percussion, flute and voice are caught here in heady maelstroms of resonance and reverberation, echo-chamber rites awhirl with the painterly expressionism of Toru Takemitsu, Kaija Saariaho and Morton Feldman, AACM’s chattering “little instruments”, and São Paulo Underground’s inscrutable, ramshackle, fourth-world exotica. Overlapping frequencies bleed disorienting distortions of reality, and wordless subpoenas accompanied by lyrical Don Cherry-like horns are slowly smothered in scalding electro-blast, wild tub-thumping sessions and the frayed ends of a disassembled gagaku field recording.

Milan transcends traditional boundaries, embodying an audacious fusion of disciplines (check the blissful cover art, Milan Scores) and a quest for abstract representation located in the ecstatic and atavistic, conjuring lucid pareidolic bouts populated by clackety Cagean ghosts, shadow demons roving an outlandish staging-post on Eddie Owens Martin’s Pasaquanian province. These deeply personal communications, charged with fire, love and honesty, form this album’s deliriously transcendent symphony of sound, which Mazurek himself has defined as, “a definite and infinite ritual towards New Utopian Futures”.