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PLANAM 049LP
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Almost a decade on from his last full length for the label, the religiously themed Teopatia, Marco Papiro returns to Planam with Con un occhio aperto, his most challenging and ambitious work to date. Known as one of the most dedicated contemporary investigators of the potential of analogue synthesizers, the musicality and personal touch of Papiro's work stand apart from a field dominated by gear fetishism and nostalgia. In recent years, one of the unique ingredients of Papiro's music has been his use of synthesized human voices, often lending his productions a dimension of uncanniness. Here, he pushes this aspect of his work much further, presenting a suite of four pieces where most listeners would be hard pressed to trace the sounds they hear back to electronic sources. The opening title piece, "Con un occhio aperto" (i.e. "With One Eye Open"), begins with metallic textures, similar to bowed cymbals or gongs, which are soon joined by waves of percussive sound, both drum-like and metallic. Irregularly rising to the surface and receding into the background, at times reminiscent of natural rhythms of rain, wind, or sea, these percussive textures are accompanied by haunting voice-like tones, at once strikingly realistic and disorienting in their non-human patterns of articulation and attack. Perhaps the closest parallel to these overlapping waves of rattling, pulsating percussive sounds and eerie extended tones is Jon Gibson's classic "Visitations," where the line between instrumental, electronic, and natural sound is blurred in a mesmerizing drift. Threaded through this hypnotic arrangement are recognizable synthesizer figures, alongside long tones performed on alto flute and bass clarinet by Christoph Bösch and Toshiko Sakakibara (members of Basel's Ensemble Phoenix). Like Teopatia, Con un occhio aperto arrives in a sleeve bearing beautiful and comical self-portrait photographs of his father. While on the earlier release, he styles himself as a saint, here he appears as a fur-clad hunter: a fitting image for this singular, exploratory music, which, like the photographs, is at once playful and primal. Edition of 300 copies.
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MARIONETT 016LP
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"Papiro's approach to music is never technical, but always personal. Since the mid-nineties, he has released a handful of noteworthy albums, each carefully put together and seemingly self- contained, yet all sharing an unmistakable musical language and a certain escapist aura. La Finestra Dentata (The Toothed Window), is no exception. It includes both studio and concert recordings from 2016?2020. The sounds on this album appear infinite and full of marvels, ingenious in portraying imaginary creatures and environments. The title track and 'Anelli' take up most of the first side and include live outtakes. Papiro likes to describe his performances as therapeutic. These swirly symphonies are specifically intended as immersive deep-listening experiences for concert venues, and have been edited for this album to meet the physical demands of vinyl and domestic use. Imagine the younger cousins of Laurie Spiegel's Concerto Generator performance, or Terry Riley's Shri Camel. However, those who know Papiro only from the stage might be unaware of a different side to his oeuvre; starry-eyed miniatures that may appear frivolous in comparison to the more heady stuff, but are nonetheless well worth discovering. Each piece adds a chapter to a phantasmagoric world populated by such characters as 'Giant Duckling', 'King Hard-Beard', or the 'Bodulator'. Tracks like the opener 'Odilon' or 'Il triciclo nascosto', meanwhile, emanate a candor rarely found in the domain of serious music, and revisit Papiro's early days of instrumental storytelling."
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MUSCUT 007LP
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From the city that brought you LSD comes a new album by Marco Papiro, the Swiss-Italian musician and graphic designer who has gained some notoriety with his album covers for the likes of Panda Bear and Sun Araw. Automare is Papiro's seventh solo album, recorded on 4-track cassette, on hard-disk, in public and in private, entirely self-produced and now released on Nikolaienko's Muscut label. The five hauntingly evocative tracks offer a variety of atmospheres from surreal to arcane, from celestial to subaqueous. Synthetic sounds (some mature EMS, Moog, and Roland) are combined with other assorted instruments (organ, shehnai, electric guitar, and bass), and emulsified through various time-and-space-bending devices. There are no percussions, with one surprisingly groovy exception, in which a drum machine is being generously treated with phaser and envelope filters -- think of early Cabaret Voltaire with a North Saharan touch. Papiro's handcrafted artificial vocals are anything but human, but all the more compelling: out of the fluorescent plankton of the side-long opening track "Rhenus Rebus" rises a siren's voice, reminiscent of Alide Maria Salvetta in Battiato's "Campane", joined in a final mantra by an oboe borrowed from an inebriated Third Ear Band. Entering a chimeric karaoke bar, the title track "Automare" makes the album even more bizarre by introducing a distinctive pop feel. Back to the abstract world, the following "Polmonella" -- a live recording with additional musicians Anthony Glass (aka Antenna Tony Monorail) and Markus Stähli (of Roy & The Devil's Motorcycle) -- is a fever-y exploration of cosmic territories in the manner of Harmonia, while the alien articulation of "Incom" sounds unlike anything else ever recorded. Edition of 300.
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PLANAM 033LP
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The subtitle of this album describes it as "Messa in scena arcaica per strumenti elettronici e voci ingannevoli" -- a play on words which could be translated as "Mass in an archaic scene (or archaic enactment) for electronic instruments and deceptive voices." The Italian graphic designer and musician Marco Papiro deliberately plays with different forms of religious music, and loosely oscillates between the spiritual and the illusory world, starting with the cover, where we can see a self-portrait of his father disguised as a saint with a steering wheel in place of the halo. As for the voices, they are deceptive in a double sense -- not only because they seem to promise eternal bliss, but also because they are completely artificial, and have been masterfully created -- like everything here -- from scratch, with an array of aged modular synthesizers. It's the thin line between the human warmth and the eeriness of its simulation that makes up the fascination of the music on Teopatia, which, by the way, is the term used to describe an indirect divine contact. Though this record might be too odd to become a religious classic, it might very well help future generations understand the turmoil of an early 21st-century youth converting to synthesizers after growing up with Catholicism.
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