Musician Alessandro Cortini has opened up the void once again. His new album on Mute, SCURO CHIARO is as remarkably easy to get lost in as was his 2019 record for the esteemed label. Cortini does so much with such minimalist arrangements that a listener to this style of music remains sort of amazed.
"ECCO" unfurls at a glacial pace, but "CHIAROSCURO" has a weird lilt to it. The cut's warm in a way, much like what Cortini offered up with Daniel Avery on another recent release, and "LO SPECCHIO" takes that vibe and adds some John Carpenter-style keyboards around it. Alessandro works well with the simplest of phrases, or sets of figures, that one sort of gets hypnotized at times by what's on SCURO CHIARO.
The epic "SEMPRE", one of the highlights here, moves forward with the precision of early Kraftwerk, a mechanical grace anchoring this, while "NESSUNO", my favorite cut here, opens up a spaciousness that's both in debt to Harold Budd and instrumental Eno. SCURO CHIARO succeeds at reminding again just how human electronica can be. But it's an even better reminder of how genre-labels can be too restrictive, especially for something like this that owes as much to the pioneers of the past as it does to Alessandro Cortini's own individualistic approach to crafting keyboard-based music.
SCURO CHIARO is out on Mute now.
More details on Alessandro Cortini via the official Facebook page.
[Photo: Emilie Elizabeth]