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2LP
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MNQ 151LP
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Alessandro Adriani marks his comeback on Mannequin Records with an impressive body of work on this double-LP Program & Rhythm, inspired by the Italian library music and soundtrack composers. Italian composers from the '60s to the '80s seemed limitless in their experiments and endlessly colorful, despite being a hidden part in the history of music. Library music takes weird and fantastic detours, between garish drum machines, seedy guitars, synthesizers gone haywire, and fractious brass sections. The scene's big names included Ennio Morricone, Piero Umiliani, Alessandro Alessandroni, Giampiero Boneschi, Egisto Macchi, A.R. Luciani, and Bruno Nicolai, just to name a few. After spending weeks on end in an improvised-by-covid home studio recording hours and hours of music every day, Alessandro was turning and shaping his analog machines into an experimental synth pop, psychedelic funky jazz, and weird ambient fusion, making up six different releases called simply Program & Rhythm from the Roland CR-78 programming buttons. The final selection of 42 tracks out of the six releases -- originally intended to be put out as tapes -- would finally compose the track list of the double vinyl presented here, with the catalog number PR and roman numerals used for the track titles. An exceptional document of music in Alessandro's discography, Program & Rhythm enters into an ultimate unknown journey, creating music for films that do not yet exist, putting his steps deeper into a faceless obscure music.
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12"
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SA 035EP
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Mannequin boss Alessandro Adriani returns to Stroboscopic Artefacts with Embryo -- an immersive four-track micro-odyssey, opening up the path for his sophomore album, Morphic Dreams (STROBO 011CD/008LP). "Elapsed Emptiness" works a dark and unremittingly oppressive vein, slowly sinking its listener into an abstract continuum. Back to groovier spirits, "Symmetry" breaks the bleak maelstrom-like movement. Tailored in collaboration with Chicago's Beau Wanzer, "Inverted Aspects" trades the filthy filters and spacious horizontality of its foregoers for a passive-aggressive acid tech swagger. "Aria (New Beat Version)" maintains a precarious balance between dancefloor-optimized music and a certain spiritual freedom to dream and escape.
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2LP
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STROBO 008LP
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Double-LP version comes in a gatefold sleeve. Hot on the heels of his preliminary EP on Stroboscopic Artefacts and two years after the landing of his 2016-released inaugural LP, Montagne Trasparenti, Mannequin helmsman Alessandro Adriani returns with his highly anticipated full-length debut for Stroboscopic Artefacts, Morphic Dreams. Throughout eleven cuts painstakingly executed but lacking not an iota of the fresh, spontaneous oomph that made his sound stand out of the crowd of techno producers to have emerged over the past decade, Adriani lays the foundations to a suspended sound imaginarium, governed by its own rules and principles of gravity. Revolving around the notions of sublimation and quest for inner balance, Morphic Dreams is comprised of four distinct sequences, conceived and designed as reflections of four mental states, each of them linked to the four alchemical elements -- i.e. Water, Earth, Air and FireFluid and enveloping, the first part takes the listener in some zero-G uterine vortex, pitching, and rolling from the slo-burning exotic sensuality and tribal spell of "The Tropical Year" to the trunk-bending, arpeggiated fast-track pulse of "Storm Trees", through the feverish electro swing of "Raindance". Entering a further abrasive, minerally rich phase, Adriani unleashes his dark side with optimum conviction. Deeply anchored in earthly materiality, this new evolution stage starts off to the frantic Italo bass of "Dissolving Images", rushing headlong into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of fractured reflections and nasty giallo-like ambience. The delirious body stretch sequence then rather abruptly swerves onto a calmer flux with "Dust/Mist", a much enticingly hip-swaying collaboration with Simon Crab, ex-member of the seminal '80s UK industrial-experimental band Bourbonese Qualk, before "Casting The Runes" engulfs you into a tormented world of swollen eeriness and disquieting esoterism. Back to a widescreen showcase of drone-y distortions, nasty acid swashes and other quirky drum programming, "Hors De Combat" opens a new chapter, shortly followed by the playful bass intricacies and modular jeu-de-piste of "Invisible Seekers", featuring Avian affiliate and longtime friend Shawn O'Sullivan. A further mind-expanding piece, "Crow" deploys its blackened wings wide and high as a chaos of martial percussions and liquefying synths slivers crash past the red-hot skyline. A fluttering melodic interlude, "Things About To Disappear" blazes a clean trail for "Make Words Split And Crack" to flourish, slowly but surely blooming into a nonstop grandiose twelve-minute-shy finale geared up with the stirring cacophonic force of a Ligetian symphony and something of an epic-scale Kubrickian soundtrack.
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CD
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STROBO 011CD
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Hot on the heels of his preliminary EP on Stroboscopic Artefacts and two years after the landing of his 2016-released inaugural LP, Montagne Trasparenti, Mannequin helmsman Alessandro Adriani returns with his highly anticipated full-length debut for Stroboscopic Artefacts, Morphic Dreams. Throughout eleven cuts painstakingly executed but lacking not an iota of the fresh, spontaneous oomph that made his sound stand out of the crowd of techno producers to have emerged over the past decade, Adriani lays the foundations to a suspended sound imaginarium, governed by its own rules and principles of gravity. Revolving around the notions of sublimation and quest for inner balance, Morphic Dreams is comprised of four distinct sequences, conceived and designed as reflections of four mental states, each of them linked to the four alchemical elements -- i.e. Water, Earth, Air and FireFluid and enveloping, the first part takes the listener in some zero-G uterine vortex, pitching, and rolling from the slo-burning exotic sensuality and tribal spell of "The Tropical Year" to the trunk-bending, arpeggiated fast-track pulse of "Storm Trees", through the feverish electro swing of "Raindance". Entering a further abrasive, minerally rich phase, Adriani unleashes his dark side with optimum conviction. Deeply anchored in earthly materiality, this new evolution stage starts off to the frantic Italo bass of "Dissolving Images", rushing headlong into a kaleidoscopic maelstrom of fractured reflections and nasty giallo-like ambience. The delirious body stretch sequence then rather abruptly swerves onto a calmer flux with "Dust/Mist", a much enticingly hip-swaying collaboration with Simon Crab, ex-member of the seminal '80s UK industrial-experimental band Bourbonese Qualk, before "Casting The Runes" engulfs you into a tormented world of swollen eeriness and disquieting esoterism. Back to a widescreen showcase of drone-y distortions, nasty acid swashes and other quirky drum programming, "Hors De Combat" opens a new chapter, shortly followed by the playful bass intricacies and modular jeu-de-piste of "Invisible Seekers", featuring Avian affiliate and longtime friend Shawn O'Sullivan. A further mind-expanding piece, "Crow" deploys its blackened wings wide and high as a chaos of martial percussions and liquefying synths slivers crash past the red-hot skyline. A fluttering melodic interlude, "Things About To Disappear" blazes a clean trail for "Make Words Split And Crack" to flourish, slowly but surely blooming into a nonstop grandiose twelve-minute-shy finale geared up with the stirring cacophonic force of a Ligetian symphony and something of an epic-scale Kubrickian soundtrack.
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12"
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SA 031EP
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Alessandro Adriani's debut EP for Stroboscopic Artefacts, Enter The Fire, is the first evidence of a new mutation in the Stroboscopic DNA. Adriani's skillful distillation of the impactful elements from EBM, acid, darkwave, and industrial is on display on "He Who Harnesses The Souls". "Rituals (707 EBM Version)" is a tense martial stomp designed around a classically effective sequence of 16th notes and bruising kick drum. A more contemplative version of "Rituals" is a deviously designed mirage of shifting audio sands. "Astronomy" evokes a private investigator on a stakeout with continuous high-frequency tones, magnified surface noise, and other encoded signals.
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