Alessandro Esseno
Pictures

LA RECENSIONE

It was fate. I hear a song on the radio, I like it. I search for it on the internet, download it: beautiful. A few months later I am at Feltrinelli, looking for a band that doesn't exist, maybe I dreamed it: "Ultraviolet"... Look... They've reissued the first Tangerine Dream album... But the vinyl had a whole different charm... I start looking for Can, Amon Düül, but also something unusual by Maria Callas and another record by a sort of eunuch with an angelic voice who sang in the Sistine Chapel in the '40s: impossible to find. But I must buy a CD, the one I heard on the radio...: "Pictures" by Alessandro Esseno. I need to dig deep, this artist intrigues me, he’s nowhere to be found, yet I can't escape his music... I'm home. Elegant, simple packaging, the tracks start playing...

A year and a half has passed. I listen to it almost every day. I must be crazy. How do I go from Rage Against the Machine, Massive Attack to Esseno? And yet... There’s a magic, a strength, an energy, sometimes it accompanies me throughout the day as I go to work, when I’m sitting on the cattle car that is the Metro... I need to study, I want to publish my first review on DeBaser, I feel I need to communicate something... Yes, but how do you not sound cliché?... But I have to start somewhere...

Purity: the first adjective that comes to mind to associate with this album. But also strength. Sonic percussion, left-hand loops like whirlpools while the right hand does anything, it flies. Depth of language and thoughts. Hyper-technicality yet in the service of art, I never liked Malmsteen... I recognize myself in this inner journey proposed by Esseno; I read some of his interviews and am struck by some words: "spiritually evolving... sonorous cells with a life of their own... vibrating frequencies..." I feel all these things in "Pictures," an album played with the piano... I am captivated. I'm now possessed by this music, regardless of its author/performer... A quirky artist, truly different in an increasingly ignoble and worn landscape. I lose myself in some works by Cage, Ligeti, Reich and then return to Esseno, it gives me joy but also hope, anything can happen tomorrow, life can change... The tracks follow one another like natural forms in continuous transformation; melancholies, ideals abandoned and then found again, loves, disappointments, bitterness... A completely innovative pianism in its apparent, but only "apparent" simplicity... Keith Tippett or Lyle Mays, Bill Evans, Don Pullen come to mind, but Esseno is something else: above all and essentially himself. "Onde" manages to take me very far indeed... And then "La mia libertà" with its glissandos and clusters of cascading notes, "Cristalli sognanti" perfect for an Andrei Tarkovsky film... Gorgeous. And then...

"Every picture tells a story," said an album from the early '70s, well, every track of this "Pictures" tells something about its author but also about us. An album that can't go out of style because style is just a chronicle of the ephemeral, while Esseno's art, on the other hand, drinks from silences and sounds coming from our souls, as well as from the cosmos that permeates and pervades every atom of us... A timeless form of art. A great artist.