Highly lush ambient music from the international team of Gri / Gutman / Mosconi on their Uncoded Winds Below The Waves (MIDIRA RECORDS MD068). These three players all have backgrounds in sound design and multimedia besides playing guitar and electronics; I have the sense that whatever instrumentation is here is less important than the overall sound schema, which in this case is carefully planned around field recordings of the wind. Matter of fact it seems they spent two days on Crete gathering these sounds, during a particularly nasty storm. Their musical concoction is built around these recordings, using them as a skeleton as it were, and they try their best to honour the dynamic movement of this most elemental of the elements.
The process is most noticeable on the last track ‘Maestrale’, where I fancy we can hear the sounds of the ocean waves a-roaring along with the slightly sombre moonlit music. As ever with a lot of ambient music, I have to work hard to get past the surface layer of what I regard as a very commonplace sound, one that’s probably quite easy to create, and which is not very challenging to the listener. However, once beyond this point, I can discern there’s a lot of craft and effort at work in the smoothly-blended layers and structural plan of this Uncoded Winds record. Well, I may say “structural plan”, but it’s more nebulous than that, and I admire the minds that can apply themselves to something so intangible as a weather system and still manage to make something out of it.
Francis M. Gri, Swiss-born but working in Italy, is a member of All My Faith Lost, an Italian combo who make “dark” music; he has also recorded as Lyef, Revglow and Apart. David Gutman is an American musician who records solo as Drawing Virtual Gardens, and plays in the duo Tropic Of Coldness. Lastly, Federico Mosconi who comes to us from an academic background and is well-known on the festival circuit with his own contemporary classical works, and his interpretations of the works of Henze and Schnittke. All three have appeared on the KrysaliSound label, run in Italy by Gri mostly as a showcase for his own works. From 23 December 2019.