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LP
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LL 001LP
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$28.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 1/24/2025
Automatic Popular Music was recorded and mixed by Nicola Ratti between July and December 2023. The tracks consist almost entirely of sounds generated by automatisms programmed on modular synthesizers. These are combined with tape loops on which fragments of both acoustic and digital pianos are engraved, generating tracks that are structured on repetitiveness in both their rhythmic and harmonic components. The adjective "popular" is in this case the result of the other adjective "automatic" since the machine has been entrusted with the task of generating the melodic patterns and harmonic structures of the tracks on the disc. Automatic Popular Music is the first release by LL, a curatorial and editorial platform based in Milano and formed by artists and curators. Mastered by Giuseppe Ielasi. Cover photo by Cédrick Eymenier. Soundohm review: "A stunning piece of generative composition that almost entirely draws upon sounds created by automatisms programmed on modular synthesizers, placed in conjunction with tape loops of acoustic and digital pianos, it's an astoundingly seductive rethinking of Minimalism, balancing the razor's edge between hypnotic repetition and the deconstructivity abstract. At its best, experimental music is a creative realm, rich with ideas, conceptualism, and radical new ways of generating organizations of sound that challenge and rework the way we navigate the world around us, particularly at humanity's expressive juncture with technology. Among the fascinating artists currently navigating and pushing the territory of exploration toward unanticipated depths is the multi-instrumentalist, Nicola Ratti." For the better part of the last two decades, the Milan-based multi-instrumentalist, Nicola Ratti, has remained one of the shining lights in Italy's localized scene of experimental electronic and electroacoustic music. Through a steady stream of striking solo LPs issued by Room40, Where To Now?, Holidays Records, Die Schachtel, and numerous other imprints, as well as within his duo with Giuseppe Ielasi, Bellows, he has simultaneously carved out a singular place in the global landscape of sound, creating a deeply personal music that engages both cutting edge, forward thinking ideas, and ground breaking approaches to technology. Automatic Popular Music almost entirely draws upon sounds generated by automatisms programmed on modular synthesizers, placed in conjunction with tape loops of acoustic and digital pianos. The inner structures of the album's eight pieces are rooted in repetitiveness in both their rhythmic and harmonic components, somehow alluding to a strange narrative that Ratti has set up in his statement about their underpinnings.
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LP
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SOD 121LP
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Continental is the new full-length solo record by Milan-based multi-instrumentalist Nicola Ratti, following recent releases on Where to Now? and Room40. Conceived of by Ratti as a "series of big rooms or places to get lost in, full of small details and characterized each by a single flavor or perfume," it is a surprising and vibrant collection of music. Working with a palette of spare, expertly deployed percussive synthesis techniques, Ratti's work here is both labyrinthine and concise. These eight tracks are able to evoke spaces real and imagined with startling efficiency and clarity. Sprawling old world libraries, cliff caves inhabited by dripping water and rock doves, an automaton nearly slipping its axis but recovering just in time and finding a new sense of purpose in the process. Ratti forms the duo Bellows with Giuseppe Ielasi. "Cuarto" features Dale Cornish. Includes download code; first edition of 300.
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CD
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RM 489CD
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From Nicola Ratti... "These recordings were made during a relatively long period of time, not continuously, over several months in my studio. Nothing was been planned in advance, not any idea of album or approach. Nevertheless I easily recognize myself in this material, moreover I recognize my working space itself. It's like taking a picture, or make a painting, of your personal room where all your stuff is well placed and, among them, their identities as sound sources and acoustic possibilities come into being. The room itself resonates ideally into the music even if, acoustically, nothing has been recorded in it. I believe there are records that you can name as an individual project with a clear identity or theme and there are others that are more like a treasure chest where you put the collection of what represent your best artistic development during a specific time on your path. This set of recordings is the later, a studio collection that summarizes the results of my experimentations of the past couple of years. Also, with this record, I got the chance of address some issues that aren't directly involved in the making of music itself, but that deal with my/our life. Specifically the problems and the consequences of our choices once we believe we could live as musicians/artist among a strictly capitalistic society. Waking up in the morning and going to the studio, without any particular deadline or imminent work that has to be done, or a series of concerts to rehearse, or whatever you do for living, sounds like a beautiful free time to create but actually it's the moment where you face more intimately your artistic life. It is not always nice. Sometime you force yourself, feeling guilty you're doing nothing even if you're so free to create, you chose to leave behind a professional identity thinking you won't attend an office anymore. Then sometimes you still face that introspective questioning along with that empty room you call a studio. This album is a kind of catharsis of that identity and the result of my days facing myself in my studio, trying to do something good and that it's worth sharing, winning this personal, but very common, struggle of the everyday. Musician and sound designer Nicola Ratti was born in Milano in 1978. He works with Giuseppe Ielasi whom he formed the project entitled Bellows.
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12"
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HOL 068EP
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Through the use of sound generated from modular synthesizer, tapes and samples, Nicola Ratti's Ossario is a collection of 10 separate and independent songs -- in two volumes, available separately -- introducing a new and radical composing method. The aim is to build some kind of musical skeletons designed not to be covered in flesh and tissue, but trying to reduce everything to the bone. Simple sounds generated with magnetic tape saturation or electric pulses match with elements belonging to the language of techno music, shifting the focus away from its usual (and predictable) axis to a new (and eccentric) point of view.
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12"
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HOL 069EP
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Second volume. Through the use of sound generated from modular synthesizer, tapes and samples, Nicola Ratti's Ossario is a collection of 10 separate and independent songs -- in two volumes, available separately -- introducing a new and radical composing method. The aim is to build some kind of musical skeletons designed not to be covered in flesh and tissue, but trying to reduce everything to the bone. Simple sounds generated with magnetic tape saturation or electric pulses match with elements belonging to the language of techno music, shifting the focus away from its usual (and predictable) axis to a new (and eccentric) point of view.
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CD
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ZEIT 012CD
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The Die Schachtel label presents a work that points out a crucial turning point in the artistic life of the well-known Italian guitarist and composer Nicola Ratti. In 220 Tones, Nicola Ratti chooses to play instruments that cannot live without electric tension, such as the synthesizer, Farfisa organ, record player, electric guitar, reel-to-reel recorder and CRT television. The relationship between the material instruments and the non-material electrical flow brightens the instruments themselves and creates a deep energy as well as an intense atmosphere that streams through the whole piece. The perfect balance between all these features is proficiently combined with the mastery of the musician as well as the imagination of the composer, making the listener feel the charm and seduction of live performance much more than the usual recording dimension.
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CD
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PRE 023CD
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The Preservation label presents Ode, the third album from Italy's Nicola Ratti. The former guitarist of self-described "math-jazz-rock trio" Pin Pin Sugar, Nicola first started recording solo works around the same time of their demise. He has also collaborated with Andrea Belfi and producer and engineer Giuseppe Ielasi in the duo Bellows. His is a deceptively languid, disarming sound of small and gentle gestures and loping rhythms, often repeated and subtly shifting in an impressionistic vision founded on traditional elements. Merging guitar, piano and double bass with percussion, environmental sounds and occasional voice, Nicola constructs songs that by turns float, swell and envelop in magnetic fashion. A piercing tenderness remains at the core of his work, though on Ode there is a more expansive palette at play for something that approaches a pure sense of grace in the sense of space and suspended atmosphere created. It's an ingratiating, personal language Nicola has been quietly developing, reaching the point with Ode where it's blossomed into something truly special.
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CD
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ANTICIP 005CD
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Italian-born multi-instrumentalist and architect, Nicola Ratti, presents his debut for Anticipate. Nicola's music can best be described as warm, subtractive rock, whereby he reduces guitar figures and piano passages into quiet explorations of the hidden corners of an otherwise familiar sound. Guitars twang with slight and spacious percussion and softly hushed (occasional) vocals and atmospheric twinkles congeal into a carefully-composed re-imagining of music. In terms of situating this album in the context of modern electroacoustic music, Nicola uses more natural effects treatments, shying away from fragmentation and processing, which obscures the inherent character of the instruments. Rather, he uses these processes to add depth and subtly tease out the hidden sonorities of his tools of choice, re-composing them and adding atmospherics along the way. By taking advantage of electronic production approaches, Nicola reworks something which is imminently accessible into an album which adds new levels of intangibility -- turning a classic and subdued sound into a future-minded extension, using the acoustics of field recordings and found sounds as instruments in their own right and allowing the harmonies between object and instrument to become more fully-realized. Dynamic and well-balanced, the album maneuvers through full, layered sequences into spare moments of near silence and back again with ease. It isn't a loud-quiet dichotomy, but rather, skillfully placed areas of intimacy. Nicola segues from droning strings and almost invisible vocals to subtly uplifting chords in an almost unnoticeable transition. From the Desert Came Saltwater is an album that sneaks up on the listener -- disappearing and also taking hold without missing a breath. With one solo album on Megaplomb, a handful of single tracks and remixes, and a recent collaboration with producer and engineer Giuseppe Ielasi, Nicola is defined by the excellence of his craft.
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