I think the name of Maurizio Bianchi / MB did not need any introduction here. He is simply one of the great fathers of electronic music in Italy and Europe and is long been considered a cult musician, recognized and enshrined in all our musical environment.
MB is an excellent artist and musician and tight end capable of producing, in over thirty years of activity, real masterpieces of music and ranging experiments at the boundaries between electronic and noise. Many of his records have become genuine landmarks of this genre.
In recent years, Maurizio has also become a point of reference and a friend for the work individual and collective for many of us. Always willing to work with many other artists in the electronic scene, he has managed to create a kind of permanent musical laboratory around them.

Into this second "sonic youth" the great MB gave us a wide range of excellent discs created by several people. And even when such collaborations have not reached the levels of the highest quality of all his previous solo work is still important and valid evidence of the symbiosis possible between his music and the artists who have collaborated with him. This MB work, however, is not in collaboration with others artistis. Maurizio plays alone (at last) and present to us a long and unique suite of sound entitled "Celtichants" that lasts just one hour. But, if you listen this suite, you feel like you take a few moments and you will do everything to try and play it back in the hour immediately following. Even'll be the last hour of your life. Because this "Celtichants" is a very beautiful work. Work i believe is also very, very important. For two different reasons.
The first reason is that, unlike other works of MB more extreme and perhaps less accessible, this work revealed from the beginning in all its splendor. Celtichants represents, for me, really "a new form of beauty" because it not only keeps intact the quality and the best creativity and artistic research of MB's music, that we always used to, but exceeds them instinctively and from the first listen. A real seminal work of which he felt the need after so much noise.
Listen to him with respectful silence then this beautiful "Celtic Songs" by MB! But do not expect human voices or ethnic harmony of the Celtic tradition. Because these Celtic songs come from a sound dreamy and unknown elsewhere and bring us up to the sound of his ethereal and stellar wind. These are our songs of Maldoror for a "fifth dimension", evidence of distant and remote place that belongs to us but in the depths of our being. A place where the spirit of Isidore Ducasse hovers behind every breath of cosmic wind that carries them. I will not say more words on the beauty of this work by Maurizio Bianchi to invite you to buy and listen to this record. But, if the first reason is not enough for a new disk of MB, I will give you a second reason why it fascinates me and I think this album is a masterpiece not to be missed. For fans of the genre but also for the neophyte listen to electronic or industrial music for the first time.
This record I came to me, last week, directly from Moscow. Together with other work which I will label the same way of speaking. The work of MB is the third title included in the catalog of a small fledgling independent label that was for me a revelation.
This label is Russian and is called "Alone at Last" and was born in march this year. On his website (www.alone-at-last.com) looks like a label focused on the realization of very limited editions of artists known and recognized in the electronic scene. It 's also the reason for not accepting demos.
If you visit his site you will sense the line and the painstaking care with which the "Alone at Last" creates their own records.
Rarely in the independent and industrial scene, I got to see this level of packaging. Each disk has a cardboard box, carved on many layers of different dominant color, each designed so as to be then folded by hand on the other in sequence. Each disc is a small gem of paper, carefully close like an ancient Japanese Origami around the jewel it contains. And the first 50 copies of each limited edition is also signed by the artist.
A few meager liner notes accompanying the content. No self-celebration of the label or artist. What is said is used as a theme track for the imaginary linked to each work. And the imagery of this is a poetic song. A deluge text composed by the terms of our technological imaginary. A poem dedicated, as all the work, to Ducasse, Comte de Lautreamont. Each disc also contains within it also precious polychrome photographic prints, based on the work of several photographers. In particular, the three prints that accompany Celtichants, are photographs taken by Siegmar Fricke in the Canary Islands over some beautiful basalt stones of Miocene epoch.
I believe I have nothing more to add. I want to give a final friendly advice: GET FAST THIS WORK by Maurizio Bianchi for Alone at Last Records. You will not regret.

ESMA is Eugenio Squarcia, a young Italian musician of less than thirty years, who lives and works in the city of Ferrara. Despite his young age he has behind him a vast work of sonic production. More than 20 self-produced disks which many are digitally availables into his bandcamp's website online store.

This last work by ESMA, titled "the Lost Atoms", however is also the first of his records to have a physical form, as it is printed and distributed by a new Italian independent label with a real strange name: "la cantina appena sotto la vita" (in english: "the winery just below the waist"). A new label that looks carefully at various kind of borderline productions. The same label, for example, has produced the debut work of another interesting Italian group, the "Margaret Lee", who despite being far away from the electronic sounds with his record the "Ballad of Beelzebub" is just outside the schematism of many rockbands, not only italians.

This album follows, after only a month, another equally interesting work by ESMA. A mini concept album called "The Archive - Soundscape from the exhibition" that is also the soundtrack composed for an installation whit artworks of the visual artist Marie Josee Cornello. The previous work of ESMA, which I highly recommend, is a good example of best synthetic atmospheres for a dark ambient of minimal electronic, that certainly would not mind at Brian Eno's fans. Among them there is surely also our ESMA because, as he says, Eno is one of its main figures of inspiration and education into the way to a personal search for a new electronic sound.

If the previous album is the dark and concise side of ESMA, this work "the lost atoms" is perhaps its most practical, conceptual and cultured component. 13 tracks with a frequent presence of abstract piano melodies who appears, sometimes, really suffered. That in some places they also underline a poignant and growing to emphasize a crescendo for a construction of an ambient tissue, rhythmic and poetic. Many songs, as we see clearly that the presentation of his work gives us ESMA, which suggest a conceptual influence arising from the literary works of William Butler Yeats. Some tracks like "No place for love and dream at all" or "the Shell" are filled with a rarefied and esoteric mystical influence that becomes the instrument of a simple sound, a sound born dark and deep but able to assume a new form of sonic beauty for his death and rebirth. So you would expect to see sprout the down from behind the "obscured clouds". clouds obscured by the darkness of night, a new dawn full of gold. A Dawn of gold rises, from behind the clouds obscured by the darkness of the night.

Into one of best tracks of this work, the mellow "Xibalba", also the title become a prelude for an explicit reference to the poetic vision of an ajar door on the afterlife underworld. The same vision narrated by the myths of the Popol Vuh. In other passages, such as the beautiful "White Road" or "Approaching the pneumatic void" we find instead musical glitch sounds and new forms of sonic minimalism able to regain possession of the noise and the sound. The young son ESMA, in most passages of his electronic songs like these, we instinctively returns the weight of an idea. Perhaps the same idea that our founding fathers, as John Cage or Steve Reich, had around the breathing sound of music.

The ESMA's music is, for this reason, electronic music for the mind, which borders on research and experimentation that most cultured. But it is also the music of sound more alive within us all, that vibrates to the rhythm of the heart and breathing. A music to listen on headphones, at high volume, while it's raining outside.
A music to let us listen, rapt, the last void spaces of this time in which we live. A time walking, with us and beside us, "obscured by clouds" above a weeping piano