“Weird Tapes” is the second duo album by Paolo Di Cioccio and Adriano Lanzi, and is released in the new catalogue “Environement” by Aventino Music, dedicated to ambient music.
The concept is a loving tribute to the imaginary worlds that arose a century ago from the creativity of the American writer Howard Philips Lovecraft, much loved by both musicians.
Starting from the title which is a blatant play on words:”“Weird Tales”, strange, bizarre stories, was the escapist literature magazine that first professionally valorized the talent of the solitary man from Providence; from “tales” to “tapes”, that is, “recordings”, the step was short".
The stories chosen for the titles of the individual songs and taken as inspiration were carefully selected outside the very famous “Chtulhu Cycle”: Lanzi and Di Cioccio were not in fact interested in setting to music the more typically horror pages, although beloved, but in paying homage to the other Lovecraftian vein, the more dreamlike, mysterious one, often no less disturbing but also full of nostalgia and a sense of wonder.
If the duo's previous work consisted of songs entirely recorded for electronic instrumentation, this new effort features only Di Cioccio on synthesis (generally elaborate ambient drones, sometimes harmonically clear, univocal, sometimes more lively, ambiguous and subtle) and Adriano Lanzi takes up the electric guitar.
"A noble musical reference, a suggestion, can certainly be traced in the iterative and hypnotic yet ever-changing sound sculptures of Fripp & Eno (“Beyond the wall of sleep”; “Ex Oblivione”; “Hypnos”) but there is also a personal elaboration of the German lesson of the “cosmic couriers”, from the most abysmal and psychedelic one of the late Klaus Schulze, a recently deceased pioneer, to that sort of synthetic, ritual folk, linked to peoples and places never seen (and perhaps non-existent) but imagined, typical of Florian Fricke/Popol Vuh (the ecstatic and contemplative guitar of “Collapsing Cosmoses”).
The bouncing beats and quarter tones of “Under The Pyramids”), up to the more cadenced and mechanical one of “Cluster” (the guitar-music box of “What the Moon Brings”, the slowly pulsating electronic oscillation of “Poetry and the Gods”), without forgetting the reinterpretation of German music made by American post-rock of the 90s and 2000s (the rarefaction that does not prevent subtle polyrhythms in “Out of the Aeons”)”.
Article published on 15 June 2022 - 12:02
