Ascanio Borga
Inner Geometry

Ascanio Borga - "Inner Geometry" (2001) Ascanio Borga - "Liquid Symmetries" (2002)(both self-released)

Finding an Italian who shows good skills in such an oversaturated field as ambient music, managing to offer a listenable product, is almost a miracle. Ascanio Borga's musical paths are punctuated with reminiscences of some sacred monsters of ambient. From Tangerine Dream's pulsating surfaces to Anugama's spatial suspensions, from Reich's minimalist insistence to Eno's mathematical poetry, the geography of ambient music has been explored far too much to still pretend to discover something new. But already the proposal of a tour of the existing, like the one offered in these records, which is enjoyable and not a déjà vu, is a pleasant surprise and a considerable success. Especially since Ascanio's music is abstract, aerodynamic, disembodied, guided by a clean, linear, absolutely contemporary sensibility. Borga synthesizes the discoveries of nearly forty years of electronic music into a few essential, post-modern, post-human, post-everything traits.

These CDs are appreciable because they are not polluted by calligraphic self-satisfaction, vain esotericism, or offensive virtuosic hyperboles. Aware of the decisive times we are living in, the music found here is understandably epic. "Inner geometry" takes off from the soundtracks of Popol Vuh for Werner Herzog's films to transform into one of the quiet right-one reverse works that Terry Riley has accustomed us to. Even "Self Interference" sacrifices invention to orthodoxy and could have been released by Dark Vinyl in a Mogadon moment. The sound slashes of "Circular Dream" continue the revival of the past, very remote this time, perhaps echoing Fripp in his 1984 phase. While alluding to the pastel-colored heart hidden in each robot that walks seriously on our streets, Borga is aware that in our post-human society, it is too late for romanticisms. But, of course, Roger Dean's historic covers seem much more appropriate for spatial lyrics like "Liquid Symmetries" than for Yes's obscene technical exhibitionism. The abstraction of timbres evokes the more cinematic moments of Real Life and the early Journeyman; other tracks echo the metaphysical solitudes and cruel alienation of the releases on Cold Meat Industry, yet purified of despair, morbid complacency, and the autoerotic excesses of the dark and cursed artist. The sound movements and processes expressed in these CDs are highly technological, they do not dirty their hands with heavy hardware nor do they cloak themselves in the gothic tone, cornerstones of traditional industrial music. On the contrary, they pass through light, evanescent veils, and the long stases ("Destination: frozen", "Beyond") are more of a waiting than an anguish. A waiting, the vision of a world to come, where the listener, invested with the function of an ambassador of the human race, ventures step by hesitant step, into an unknown but reassuring environment - parallel to the expanses of Biosphere, but devoid of the alienated relational desert of the Norwegian. Small lights, enveloping mists, minute animal presences seem to create a new order in which man can finally shine with his own virtues, instead of proclaiming his own mud, as is now customary. In the first three minutes of "Dream Scape", Borga even managed to condense the entire hour of "Music for Airports", before the track spiraled out of his hands to fan out in a luminous transfiguration worthy of a mystical ecstasy: his happiest moment, so far.

Someone should divert him from a career as a teacher or researcher that's looming after the turning point of his degree, and give him a film to score, an installation to soundize, or, at the very least, an Acropolis on which to perform.