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ICTUSRE 012LP
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In the summer of 1976, a peculiar album appeared in Italian record shops, its cover bearing no artist name, only the cryptic moniker Elektriktus. For the handful of listeners who encountered it before it vanished from circulation, the music posed a question that wouldn't be answered for decades: who had created this strange hybrid of jazz sensibility and kosmische synthesis, this music that seemed to emanate from somewhere between Cologne and Calabria? The answer was hiding in plain sight. Andrea Centazzo, by then a recognized figure in European free improvisation -- a percussionist who had shared stages with Steve Lacy, Evan Parker, and Derek Bailey -- had been leading a double life. Between 1973 and 1976, in the intervals between touring with Giorgio Gaslini's quartet (Gaslini would soon co-compose Dario Argento's Profondo Rosso with Goblin), Centazzo retreated to his farmhouse in Moruzzo and to studios in Pistoia, where he conducted experiments with Minimoog, Davolisint, and the GEM Rodeo 49, an Italian-manufactured synthesizer that had become essential equipment in the country's progressive rock underground. What emerged from these sessions was music that occupied a peculiar position in the taxonomy of 1970s electronic experimentation. PDU Records -- owned by the pop icon Mina and by the mid-seventies functioning as Italy's primary distributor for German avant-garde labels like Ohr, Brain, Kosmische Musik, Pilz, and Kosmische Kuriere -- recognized the value of what Centazzo had created. But there was a commercial calculus at work: the label's executives worried that Centazzo's established identity as a jazz percussionist would confuse the market for cosmic electronics, then in the process of consolidating as a genre distinct from both progressive rock and academic electronic music. The solution was to create Elektriktus -- a pseudonym that functioned as a conceptual portmanteau, fusing "electronic" with "Ictus," the name Centazzo would soon give to his own label and to his series of percussion works. The name suggested both electronic impulse and percussive attack, a synthesis that accurately described the music's character. For where German kosmische musik tended toward the infinite and the abstract, Centazzo's electronic music retained a tactile, almost physical quality.
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LP
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ICTUSRE 013LP
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In 2019, Andrea Centazzo discovered unlabeled tape reels in his mother's attic in Udine -- boxes assumed lost seven years earlier. What emerged from these deteriorating reels, transferred by engineer Sergio Tomasini during COVID lockdowns, was unexpected: unreleased recordings from the original Elektriktus sessions of 1973-76, alongside other archival materials including previously unknown collaborations with Steve Lacy and Evan Parker from the same period. Centazzo's solution was conceptually elegant: add contemporary digital electronics to the original analog Elektriktus recordings, creating temporal palimpsest in which the seventy-something composer engages in dialogue with his younger self. Crucially, his fundamental approach hasn't changed. "Making a 10-minute loop meant playing and overdubbing for 10 minutes!" This rejection of computer automation, this insistence on the hand-played and physically executed, links 2025 to 1975 through continuous methodology. Electronic Mind Waves Volume 2 operates in complex registers: contemporary electronics don't "update" the original recordings but exist in conversation with them. By overlaying 2025 digital work onto 1975 analog recordings, Centazzo creates proof that affinities between cosmic drift and percussive grounding were present in the original conception, waiting to be heard. This temporal doubling produces music that is neither nostalgic recreation nor radical revision but something more complex -- a conversation between past and present, between the composer who created these sounds in the mid-1970s and the artist who now understands their full implications.
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