Alio Die
Under An Holy Ritual

Alio Die, also known as Stefano Musso, a reserved and silent Milanese in his forties, has for several years made discretion and silence a foundation upon which to implant and cultivate his form of music. Despite being a non-musician, self-taught, and having come to sound relatively late, he has numerous albums and notable collaborations with international names in the ambient and concrete area to his credit.

Starting from the lessons of artists dear to him (among them Nocturnal Emission) and relying more on intuition than technique, towards the end of the '80s, he began experimenting and recording, creating his own small personal label and distributing material in a niche channel.

From the first cassettes, carefully packaged and with some inevitable creative flaws, the first official album "Under an holy ritual" was born, which already in the title reveals its nature without shadows - a title that, incidentally, contains a glaring English grammatical error.

The ritual, the sacredness: even without having any real esoteric or religious reference, these concepts lead to where Alio Die has always sought the key for an introspective communion with the world and nature. From sound to the concentration of the individual, passing through spaces of rarefaction that touch on silence and thus the essence of things and elements. A musicality made not of notes, but of evocations and vibrations, which repeat cyclically and are enriched with new voices over time.

Nothing really new, moreover, since numerous British and American projects at the time had already produced remarkable works in that direction. However, it must be said that Alio Die then knew how to follow his path without stagnating and demonstrating happy illuminations with an extremely intense "mystical" delicacy. So much so that many have criticized him for an excessive metaphysicality and an almost ascetic detachment from the purposes that music as such should have. The pieces imbued with wind and calls of distant creatures are not singable. Just as the sound sources used by Stefano Musso are often unorthodox. "Under an holy ritual" was created more with environmental recordings and ready-made samples. As a debut work, it did not yet have the personal drive to mark itself as an original album from a conceptual point of view. This, however, happened with later works, certainly more substantial and intriguing in their structure.

For this reason, my rating is not very high: a good debut, but far from expressing the quintessence of an author who in '89 was too anchored to his models.