Suzanne Ciani, Tangerine Dream

In the rich bill of the 2018 edition of the well-established Dancity, in the heart of beautiful Foligno, it was truly hard to choose what to see and what to skip. Fans of wide-ranging electronic music found themselves faced with a tightly packed lineup across the whole late-August weekend, with Saturday and Sunday winking at the dancefloor and, in some respects, at a younger crowd, as seen in the live sets by the Moritz Von Oswald trio and the celebrated duo Wolf Müller & Niklas Wandt, as well as Bufiman's dj-set. The second part of the same day also offered no fewer than three stages at the Serendipity, each with its own sound: the Play Room hosted Chevel, Amelie Lens and SpecialRequest, while the Rec Room featured Skatebård and Black Merlin; out in the open-air space, Fantastic Twins and Deena Abdelwahed also made an appearance. Closing out the festival on Sunday was the debut of Nu Guinea with an eight-piece band, joined by live sets from Mystic Jungle, The Barking Dogs, and Vladimir Ivkovic.

But it was on the festival's first day that the history of electronic music made its presence felt, coming in through the front door, with the eagerly awaited performances of the divine Suzanne Ciani and a reshuffled (and reinvented) Tangerine Dream; a formidable double bill, with a set by none other than Burnt Friedman, alongside Iranian musician Mohammad Reza Mortazavi, sandwiched in between. It almost felt like fate that the dancing was kicked off by the legendary Buchla 200, placed at the centre of the room like a sacred totem to be worshipped. Impossible to resist its charm.

One last look at the precious, hugely expensive instrument, and out from the wings appeared Ciani, as regal and composed as ever, in great shape despite no longer being young. Within seconds, that Don Buchla-stamped miracle lit up like a beacon in the fog, driven by the modulations of the American experimentalist of Italian descent, strung together between a sudden jolt and a pirouette, a scratched beat that's never quite let loose, and electro-symphonic pauses. After all, she herself likes to call it Quadriphonic Live, and the feeling really is one of being immersed in a four-channel flow that alternates between an eternal avant-garde restlessness and absolute composure; the latter honed over the years through her long new age career straddling the 1980s and '90s. A scant thirty minutes, essential yet vibrant with passion for a highly unusual machine that Ciani handles with great delicacy; a treasure chest brimming with impulses that she herself paid tribute to in shy Italian at the end of the performance, sharing plenty of small details about its handcrafted construction and the origin of its components.

Good old Friedman's performance, on the other hand, was a very different affair: he essentially looped variations on themes lifted from “Bokoboko”, ultimately his latest work, which winks at Eastern and African rhythms. Nothing thrilling, especially when comparing the live rendition to the better-calibrated versions on his records. Still, “old” Burnt remains fascinating even in these polyrhythmic fixations of his, and that's fine, notwithstanding a few too many yawns shortly before the big event, namely the Tangerine Dream concert; the only Italian date by a lineup necessarily reshuffled, made up for the occasion by a decidedly unusual trio: Ulrich Schnauss, Thorsten Quaeschning and violinist Hoshiko Yamane. Well, if there were any doubts beforehand, they were thoroughly dispelled by a sound calibration that was simply perfect from the very first beat. But above all by the state of grace the group's momentary leader, the great Schnauss, was in, as he steeped the cosmic couriers' sound in some of his own pearls, stringing together one moment of absolute bliss after another.

A trip that reached its peak with “Stratosfear”, the epochal suite that gives its title to the always-underrated 1976 album. Plenty of emotions also surfaced during the spacey, contemplative “Love On A Real Train”, taken from the excellent 1984 “Risky Business”; a track that managed to anticipate the IDM shapes of acts like Boards Of Canada. A hidden milestone that keeps “working its way” through one influence after another in the “new” electronic landscape of the Old Continent. An utterly immersive concert, worthy of a band that has quite simply made the history of music of the last century.

*Photo by Luigi Alex Raia

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