Alessandra Rombolà, Out of the playground, Norway, Sofa Music, SOFA596 CD digipak (2023)
Originally from Calabria in southern Italy, Alessandra Rombolà trained as a flautist in contemporary classical music in France, Italy, Spain and the UK, specialising in extended techniques, the notation and the contemporary classical repertoire of the flute. She lived in Madrid for 20 years where she taught at the Madrid Royal Conservatory and worked as both a soloist and collaborator in various musical projects. Currently she lives and works in Oslo as a freelance musician concentrating on solo projects, one of which “Out of the playground” is a record of Rombolà’s recent collaborations with four composers – Daniela Terranova, Jan Martin Smørdal, Ingar Zach, Lasse Marhaug – on solo flute and electronics with the aim of breaking out of their respective music genre confines (“the playground”) to discover new musical territories.
Jan Martin Smørdal’s two pieces “Répétition II” and later “Répétition” feature the addcoder, an instrument developed by Smørdal that records, amplifies and plays back at once. In these pieces, Rombolà plays a phrase that the addcoder throws back at her and which she has to replicate exactly, so that the addcoder ends up layering her efforts continuously and creates network upon network of iterations and repetitions. The resulting flute music can be very eerie and otherworldly, and especially on “Répétition” you can feel you are in a very stark natural environment where your only companions are the rocks strewn over bare ground and biting cold air whipping your bare face. “The Ring”, composed by both Rombolà and frequent collaborator Zach, is a minimalist game of hide-and-seek played by Rombolà on light-footed bass flute, piccolo and pre-recorded flutes in succession with Zach’s slow and steady electronics. Terranova’s “Breathing Rust and Clouds” showcases Rombolà’s flute work only, with no electronics, and this work shows the flautist in full flight, skipping through the space with feather-light flurries of melody and a series of light percussive bops that almost seem alive.
On the last piece, “Our Forbidden Land”, Rombolà plays flute, piccolo, alto flute, bass flute and electronics, from which music so generated Lasse Marhaug created a work and gave it to the flautist to create more melodies for more recordings by Marhaug. The resulting work is a gradual construction from the initial woodwinds into a massive structure of flute melodies, electronics, unusual percussion effects and a low-end steady droning ambience. In its last few moments the composition becomes a huge noisy, even screechy and very heavy dronescape.
Of the five pieces, the contributions from Marhaug and Smørdal are definitely worth the price of the album even if Marhaug’s piece might be slow in its evolution from light and fragile to a solid monolith of flute-and-electronics noise. The other compositions are interesting in revealing the flute’s potential for extreme music and playing techniques though they also demonstrate the limits for that potential: they do sound very fragile, even insubstantial at times, and need another instrument or set of instruments to contrast with and complement the flute and its delicate character.