Olhon
Veiovis

The Olhon project, born in Italy thanks to the Tuscan artist Zairo Nucciotti, has realized - starting from 2001 - a couple of very interesting records, based on the processing of natural sounds without the aid of synthesizers or other musical instruments.

"Veiovis" emerged in 2001 with collaboration from the more renowned Bad Sector in a realm less industrial than one might expect and utilizes a series of recordings prepared with great initiative to show how much creativity can arise from the interaction between Nature and human ingenuity. The two artists launch into the waters of some Central Italian lakes a professionally set-up microphone attached to an extremely long cable; they capture the noises that "lie beneath" and then bring them to the studio to transform them into a series of tracks with an unsettling and arcane charm.

It sounds simple, but it is not. What the two manage to put on the CD is incredible, and thinking about how the muffled and deep sounds were obtained gives you chills. Especially when listening to the piece recorded in the dark lake of Albano, whose depth of 170 meters lets you imagine the murky sensations experienced in an ideal immersion following the microphone cable.

The music so produced has all the characteristics of a true musical work, even though no traditional or electronic instrument appears in Olhon's creative process. The atmospheres take on contours that probably no synthesizer could suggest, and the water shows that the genetic code of planet Earth holds unsuspected resources for those with will and talent.

Moreover, a few years earlier, Nucciotti himself had produced another remarkable album - perhaps a little less varied - in which recordings of the wind constituted the raw material of the sound processing. Thus, will and talent combined with a well-defined project are the perfect base to go beyond conventions and experiment with something that isn't experimental at all. Because wind and water have been on this earth for millions of years.

In short, Olhon is truly worthy of attention and combines the dogma of concrete music with an ambient evolution in the strictest sense of the term. Listening to this album means taking a mental and emotional journey to the places where the sound was extracted, with a whole load of shadows and anxieties that move away from the (often overused) spirit of new-age philosophies and return to the beginnings in a crescendo of ancestral sensations.