There’s a quiet daring in naming yourself after the Latin for “silence”, especially when your music seems so intent on abolishing it. Fickle, the third album by Francesco Zedde under the moniker Tacet Tacet Tacet, is a work of tension and transformation - a place where sound tries to push beyond its own edges, only to find new boundaries.
Zedde, now based in Utrecht but born in Italy, has long pursued a hybrid territory: ambient textures, glitch, concrete fragments, processed instruments, fields and samples. In Fickle, those methods are less ornament than foundation: rather than layering effects over sound, he seems to sculpt from sounds themselves, carving rhythms and melodies out of ambience. Indeed, the label describes the project as assembling ambient noises into structures, letting the listener drift from formlessness into pattern.
The album opens with “Gamble”, a solo drum motif gradually stretched, mirrored, and refracted until it is no longer “just drums” but a shifting terrain of pulses and echoes. It feels like watching a stone drop into a pond at midnight: the ripple becomes the pond. “Dissimulation” follows, unsettling with its lithe dissonances and abrupt silences. The horizon breaks here - what was sparse becomes uneasy, as though the air itself has pitched into fracture.
In “Pertinence”, glitchy rhythms, processed guitar, and irregular beats dance a jittery tango together. It’s one of the more structured moments - but structure here is elastic, always ready to warp. “Unfocus” pushes that warp further: pulses collapse, voices or fragments slide in and slip out, as though you’re half-listening to a hidden conversation in a storm. The field-recorded and elemental influences from Zedde’s trips (notably to Iceland) surface most vividly in “Welter”, which bathes insects, old organ, and bells in a slow, late-night glow.
The closing “Recurrence” is hypnotic minimalism. Two piano chords loop like heartbeats, their repetition both consoling and relentless. Processed breath, glitch and artifact swirl around them, as though the music is both resisting stasis and trapped in it. A voice - Rea Dubach, heavily transformed - drifts almost subliminally in the backdrop, as if memory trying to speak through interference.
For listeners familiar with his earlier work, Fickle might feel like a quieter, more introspective pivot. While the confrontations and noise gestures of past records remain in shadow, here they’re internalized. Rhythm is not a demand but a question. Texture doesn’t envelop - it suggests. Zedde’s collaborators, especially Jacopo Mittino (aka 52 Hearts Whale), help guide that balance; on tracks like “Gamble” and “Unfocus”, their co-composition tempers and redirects the tension.
If you’re a listener who falls in love with a note, Fickle asks you to wait; let it stretch, shift, and reappear. It’s not always comfortable. Some moments feel like your ears are catching shadows. But therein lies its beauty. This is music built from the space between sounds, and from the courage to let that space hold you.