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Rating: We find ourselves moving in territories of "cold" and "non-emotional" electronic contamination in this work "Water & Architecture" from 1997 (Sub Rosa Edition Austria) created as the ideal soundtrack to the film of the same name, unpublished in Italy, curated by a group of little-known "free agents": Directions, Atom Heart, Bisk, Seefeel, and the Aer (signatures little known even in the electronic/experimental frontier environment). Certainly, it would be nice to "interpret" these atmospheres also through the use of the images that explicitly inspired them, but one must acknowledge and seize this "minus" as an opportunity to dive without prejudice into the listening of this "soundtrack," free from "constraints" that could compromise its judgment.
The album starts with a powerful and rhythmic "EnCode," balancing between Four Tet and Matmos, proceeding with Atom Heart’s "Space Is Sanity" more rarefied and minimalist, at times indebted to the harmonic structures of Pan American and their cousins Murcof. With the triplet "Circular Sound - sewing thread - Vague recollection" by Bisk, we return to the syncopated and "disaligned" destructuring, fond to Mouse on Mars, with funk pollutants (in Sewing thread) and draws from Amon Tobim’s DJ-set implants, expanding its sound spaces to the limits of experimentation.
With the arrival of Seefeel, the ears take their deserved rest, and with "Is it now" one immerses into certain ambient atmospheres dear to the old Eno, in surrogates of underground and dark dub, a midpoint between the more introspective Massive Attack of 10 years ago and certain modern long diversions (although this term risks leading us astray). With the three concluding "songs" by AER (2 if you exclude the 20-second duration of the track "Radio Siberia"), we fall back into that underworld of dark and obsessive, muffled and depressed, fragmented and disassembled soundscapes by a thousand samples inserted as a corollary. Pieces of readings, African religious chants, radio passages, and uncontrolled experiments that, in some aspects, recall the sounds used in Brian Eno and David Byrne's masterpiece album "My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts" from way back in 1981.
A record that in certain respects is glacial and inhuman, but not lacking that damnedly dark charm that makes us perceive for a few moments landscapes of immensity and fury, aseptic and austere like certain angular corners of our most melancholic and spectral soul.
(Sorry, but rereading it, I realized I wrote it terribly, hence...)
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