Official music video of the 5th track:
youtu.be/q1pdKU0Ak0c
"Atomic City" is the fourth album by Vincenzo Ramaglia, landing of a long research path that begins more than ten years earlier and is marked by the three recording projects before this unexpected electronic turn: "Formaldeide" (2007, score for flute, clarinet, sax and piano), "Chimera" (2008, score for double-bass and loop station with improvisations of sax and drums), "PVC smoking" (2011, "IDM score" for cello, bass clarinet and electric bass with improvisations of sax and electronics).
After seven years of reflection, silence, construction and deepening of an electronic setup without a computer, "Atomic City" is a surprise, an album finally naked, devoid of any score, but with an intricate maze of analogue sequences, composed on the machines as on a pentagram, almost in a thoughtful orchestral counterpoint, and manipulated in real time by the author, to which Renato Ciunfrini - already sax of "Chimera" and "PVC smoking" - this time reacts with clarinetist improvisations. In a sense, "Atomic City" is the promised land of all the peregrinations and breaks that precede it. The synthesis - unexpectedly coherent and explosive in his unprecedented language - of a vast collection of seemingly contradictory urgencies. And it is, in fact, PEM. Popular Experimental Music.
The words of Vincenzo Ramaglia confirm that: "I have always aspired to a music that can integrate experimentation and approachability. I think that to experiment does not necessarily mean to bore or to distress the listener: you can also experiment by blanding the ear, not just wounding it. to experiment, in my opinion, means to pursue - and therefore to determine - the present day by day (rather than to lean nostalgically on the past or opportunistically on the already felt). I’m not a big lover of ‘four-on-the-floor’, so when I embraced the electronics I immersed myself in more restless, schizophrenic, elusive contemporary rhythms. Drill’n’bass, breakcore, glitch... Squarepusher, Venetian Snares, Autechre, Alva Noto, Ryoji Ikeda... All artists who do a great deskwork of editing to produce their phantasmagoric and always changing sound textures, a work that is often masterly and of great impact for me. The challenge is: to recreate with my hands that same ‘organized restlessness’, but in an impromptu way, without editing, treating the machines as musical instrument. Maybe also for this reason, the clarinet of Renato (whose improvisations have always evoked me the paintings-sculptures with destroyed instruments of Arman), in ‘Atomic City’, crosses the threshold of the acoustic instrument, interpenetrating into my electronics, whose slippery rhythm - in turn - often suddenly dissolves and leaves room for the most impalpable rarefaction. Like a pendulum that oscillates, decomposed and humoral, between a crazy drum machine and the meditative tintinnabulum by Arvo Pärt. Between the most intricate and cramped gear of a clock and the bare vastness of a desert. ‘Atomic City’ is the result of these walks in another, unknown place. Impossible ridge between two antipodes. And that is how, several years ago, I perceived that ghost town of Idaho - Atomic City, in fact - which gives the title to the album. A place of consciousness. A non-place. Abandoned but inhabited (by two souls who run a bar). Forgot but kept alive. Remote but familiar. A handful of houses, ruined signs, vestiges, that few know, reached as a coveted and improbable destination, like a new planet, through hours and hours of driving in routes that cleave the nothing".
released January 22, 2019
Clarinet: Renato Ciunfrini.
Electronics: Vincenzo Ramaglia.
Electronic setup (without computer): Elektron Analog Four, Elektron Octatrack, Pioneer RMX-1000, Nord Drum 2, Moog Minitaur, DSI Tetra, Dreadbox Erebus.