Demdike Stare
The Feed-Back Loop

THE REVIEW

Perhaps the story of the Gruppo di Improvvisazione di Nuova Consonanza, a project formed by Franco Evangelisti in the early 1960s and inspired by minimalist compositions and what we can define as avant-garde or "contemporary music," has over the years steadily involved gigantic names like Ennio Morricone, Roland Kayn, Giovanni Piazza, Frederic Rzewski, Jesus Villa Rojo, Mario Bertoncini, John Heineman, percussionist Egisto Macchi, double bassist Walter Branchi... A central experience and, perhaps in certain aspects, entirely unprecedented in the Italian scene of those years, which did not envy anything in terms of depth from famous names in the field of minimalism and avant-garde from other countries.

Now it's not easy to say whether the fact that the GINC does not enjoy great popularity, perhaps not even among enthusiasts, is a limitation due to a certain reversed parochialism, that typical component of the homo italicus that often leads to disparaging one's roots with a rage that then takes opposite directions and becomes an unjustified exaltation of oneself and one's worst nature; the fact remains that those who have paid the most attention to this piece of our history in recent years have been Sean Canty and Miles Whittaker aka Demdike Stare, a Manchester, England-based ambient and electronic music duo, and with this record named "The Feed-Back Loop" (DDS), they dedicate an entire album to the Group, recorded live in the presence of old members of the original collective: Giancarlo Schiaffini, Giovanni Piazza, Alessandro Sbordoni, and Ennio Morricone!

"The Feed-Back" (1970) is one of the most well-known recordings of the improvisation collective and it is this track that gives the entire work its name, developed in four pieces and with the use of modern instruments like synths and digital effects (plus the inclusion of analog equipment) and thus as such ensures that the record sounds like a tribute, but also at the same time like a kind of renewal in a massive and sumptuous production of ambient music, which goes beyond simple "repetitions" and has its own true dignity that should not be underestimated.