Review: Vince Clarke (Erasure, Yazoo, Depeche Mode, The Assembly) presents his first ever solo album, Songs of Silence. As the album title suggests, it's a lyricless (though not vocal-free) instrumental album, and unlike anything you might've previously heard before from Clarke as an artisan of dynamic electropop. Rather, this LP brings with it a comparatively sober ambient electronic beauty, its unique characteristics lending it a category of its own. But two self-imposed oblique strategies underpinned its creation - first, that the sounds Clarke generated for the album would come solely from Eurorack (a modular synthesizer format introduced in the mid-90s), and second, that each track would be based around one note, maintaining a single key throughout.
Review: Trailed as a direct sequel to his previous solo album, 2017's "Avanti", "Volume Massimo" sees Nine Inch Nails member Alessandro Cortini offer up another immersive trip through droning guitar textures, repetitive synthesizer motifs, exotic sitar parts and fuzzy electronics. It's effectively a series of "maximal" instrumental soundscapes with sounds so large and layered they rise above the "meditative" tag pushed by Mute's PR team. This is no criticism, though, just a reflection that while contemplative at times, one of the most joyous things about the album is Cortini's ability to build thrilling walls of sound.
Review: Italian musician, producer, composer, and instrument builder Alessandro Cortini unveils his latest release, NATI INFINITI, via Mute. Following up on 2021's Scuro Chiaro, NATI INFINITI is a forty-minute piece split into five movements, based on an immersive audio installation that Cortini originally created for the Sonar Lisboa festival in 2022, where it was presented across four floors of the Museu de Lisboa's Moagem. Marked by intense bouts of airy, tubular ambiences; and yet more sawwing tones counterposed with stark, angelic highs, giving rise to intensely beautiful arp sequenes, Cortini's latest is a real distillation of the sublime.
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