Fabio Orsi
Osci

THE REVIEW

This work by Fabio Orsi, released in 2005, has several peculiarities: firstly, the format, as it was published only on vinyl by the label Small Voices. The short duration: only 35 minutes. The musical style: atmospheric ambient where electronics and recordings of folkloric events coexist, such as village festivals. This last aspect, in particular, is very important: Orsi uses the technique of field recordings, that is, environmental recordings that are integrated into the musical fabric, made of soft melodies repeated in loop and sound layers, otherwise known as drones. A few touches, here and there, on the piano or guitar, to which noises of real life are added; and electronics as a binder.

The environmental sounds are those of his land, Salento. Thus "Osci" (named after the ancient inhabitants of southern Italy) is configured as a kind of sound documentary: the two sides of the long-playing present two untitled tracks, each 17 minutes long, structured overall in about ten episodes. They emerge from the background like acoustic ghosts, remain briefly in the foreground, and then disappear again into the background. In succession one after the other, as in a hallucinated film.

Although Fabio Orsi never explicitly cites them as his references, one's thoughts run to illustrious figures like Béla Bartók, the first field recorder in history, passing through the noise music of Pierre Schaeffer and the ethnic Stockhausen of "Telemusik". Among the influences that Orsi acknowledges, there is the American ethnomusicologist Alan Lomax, author in the 1950s of a monumental inventory of over two thousand environmental recordings of Italian popular tradition. Fabio Orsi localizes the concept and defines himself as a sound engineer, even better, a phonographer: the one who «captures a sound moment in a specific place and time».

And so he did, wandering through local festivals, full of traditional songs, dances, folk music, and life, pouring some transfigured fragments into the music of "Osci", a successful endeavor in its sparse essentiality and in the use of spectral and hypnotic electronics.

How do we want to define this work? Rural ambient, drone folk, neo-concrete music... The choice is yours. But with "Osci" we discover the presence of a musician like Fabio Orsi to follow with great attention.