Instead of older and bolder I've become older and slower, shame on me, infact I received this work a while ago, right after I've seen this guy playing live before and together with Manuel Mota. The only thing I can say is that in the meanwhile I've been listening to this collection of guitar works repeatedly and considering who many solo recordings I've stumbled into during the last decade the fact itself would help you to figure out this one can't be filed in the "hell boring" category. More than far from boredom, this young guitarist has assembled a series of compositions and improvisations that without indulging in technics and in self complacency brought in some fresh inspiration. M Tabe style, despite his young age is quite mature, hey if you're into Derek Bailey and if you think this' another petty clone of that improvisational hero you're wrong, the style of this italian musician is more classic guitar oriented. These guitar works are soft, warm and quiet...another possible definition could be meditative, whatever this may suggest. The fact is despite its asperity this release has an all-italian taste for melody, don't think we're dealing with some napolitan oriented guitar or whatever, but I dare you to say the music has no mediterranean aftertaste.

This another chapter of the personal saga started a while ago by Matteo Uggeri, but stylistically this work brings the italian musician in what I think is his favorite musical habitat: a nowhere land where melancholy ties the knot with field recordings and melody. Melancholy could be the subtitle of the whole recording, infact Giannico (you probably know for some interesting solo releases) went for some minimal piano playing perfectly arranged by some more than inspired interventions by Luca Mauri (I/O, Luminance Ratio) and by some elegant cello harmonies by Andrea Serrapiglio (Carla Bozulich, Paramount Style). The high emotional impact and the overdose of melody of the cd makes me wonder if instead of ambient music or field recordings, we're simply in front of a minimalist, quasi pop, cinematic series of compositions. Do you really think I'm just exaggerating? So tell me if some of these litanies wouldn't be suitable for some romantic movie? In a way we've something that brings forth that language that some of these post-post-post meets camera music combos on Constellation have been recording during the last ten years and in my book that means elegance plus quality. This' one of those releases so mellow and so catchy that could be dug by a big range of listeners, not exactly a sunny release, I can't say why but it makes me think to autumn's leaves and to the end of the summer. Can you remember that Tears for Fears' line that says "Advice for the young at heart soon we will be older", it kept buzzing into my head for the whole length of the recording.

Some years ago I've been introduced to the music of Tiziano Milani thanks to the fact in the wonderful homage to Alvin Lucier, Claudio Parodi put out on Extreme records, the musical fragment used as sound source was sampled from Milani. From then on, this italian electronic composer has collected several works under his belt and the most of them have been released on Setola di Maiale (an experimental, avant jazz, uncenventional music label I can't but suggest to taste). Funny, but the title itself could suggest one of the labels suitable for a kind of recording like that, infact due to the compositions and for the amount of concrete-electronic sounds used, it brought to my mind some of the most intense and intriguing composers on Touch label. The framework is a classy collage-patchwork of music performed by several jazzy, classic, contemporary musicians, infact the line up of this recording includes: Koji Nishio on piano, Hiromi Makaino on electronic percussion and rhythms, Lars Musiikki on double bass and guitar, Cristian Corsi on Tenor sax and Lynn Westemberg on viola. After having listened to several of his releases I can say Tiziano Milani's style is clearly distinguishable, infact his magmatic-nightly soup has its own identity. Differently from his previous recordings, Touch has a more contemporary heart and some of the instruments tend to surface from the collage with their own characteristic sounds above all the piano and that's what may confer a conservatory aura to the whole work. An interesting composer/laptop musician with an identity.

I think many of you into unconventional/refined music have already stumbled into this label due to releases like Andrea Marutti, A Spirale or Jelousy Party, but this' a new division of the label and it's focused on musicians and composers with a minimalist, isolationist, electronic electroacoustic, whatever edge. The first release to open the series is Alberto Boccardo, I didn't know that much about him before this cd and even if you can't judge a book by the cover, it's a good debut both for the label and for the musician. Boccardo works on melodic, cinematic textures not too far from Ben Frost, Tim Hacker or music in the likes, even if I can assure you guitar is not is main element in most of the tracks, it looks like he's a guitarist (by the way who's not a guitarist in 2012?!). Even if this' a collection of "compositions", the ambient-electronic influence in many of the track is always pulsing underneath, this is not exactly electronic music and there's no intention to be filed under this category but as I've said I think the genre is overshadowing this work. I'm sure many critics will be complaining about some passages including the use of the soft melodic female vocals in the second track, but I totally approve the end result and you know why? Because despite the intensity e the phatos of the music, Boccardo managed to maintain a light touch there so if you're looking from some isolationist-post industrial heaviness stay away. Thumbs up to this young guy.

"If two quantum channels each have a transmission capacity of zero, they may still have a nonzero capacity when used together". Such a scientific observation, taken from an article issued on scientific web-zine PHYSorg about a study about so-called superactivation which is going to pave way for new interesting developments in communication sciences and schematized in the diagram used as a cover, emphasize the concept at the basis of this release by Lucio Capece, Berlin-based Argentinean musician having a fad for tone-colour sonic experiments and prepared instruments as well as for music with no underlying narration (zero premises, zero lyrics, zero plots, zero praecepts don't imply something should be considered nonsensical). After the entrancing opening track "Some move upward uncertainly", dedicated to Harley Gaber (our collaborator Steve Mecca recently spoke about him while reviewing "In Memoriam 22010", issued two weeks before his suicide) where he just plays the Indian Sruti box, a sort of harmonium whose ascending and hypnotic sound is getting quite popular between Western musicians, listeners can appreciate Capece's skills in preparing instrument since the following title track where he extracts some nice effects from his soprano saxophone after preparation with different objects, which could persuade some saxophone players to look for hidden pop-corn machines or little metal shredder inside your saxophone, whilein the three parts of "Inside the outside", it seems that Lucio's focused on breath, which has been musically observed and overstressed not only for its wide performative range relkated to time stretching (like in the first part, where there's a wise alternation of silence in between chords before he switch ring modulator on), but it seems he's also interested in catching snapshots of his elemental monads, so that cardboard tubes he uses for the recording of the second and third (as well as my favorite one) part could be thought as a musical surrogate of a tubular particle accelerator. In this release, he also included a track, "Spectrum of One", inspired by the 50th anniversary of the first photograph of our planet taken from the deep space, based just on single sine waves, which looks like transmissionary signals, launched over the cosmic void.