LINO STRANGIS - The Sunrise Of The Stonertronic Oracle

A new worthy offspring of the Roman ambient school, alongside Nimh, Netherworld and Ascanio Borga, now appears on the horizon: Lino Strangis. An "intermedial" artist, creator of installations, co-founder and artistic director of the C.A.R.M.A. association, Strangis uses YouTube as a portfolio for his creations ("A New Big Bang For A New Home", "Pensiero volante non identificato", "Just An Apple", "Trasmissioni"), and launched the extemporaneous project E.T.E.R.E. with Giovanni Paris and Giulia Pellini.

His first releases under his own name are two two-part digressions, "Space Trip To The Mind" (2016), still rather trivial but with a decent second half of reprocessed-guitar electronic counterpoint, and "Oneiric Adagio" (2016), essentially a dreamlike remix of Albinoni's "Adagio", caught between confusion and dissonance.

"The Sunrise Of The Stonertronic Oracle", in seven parts, is his true starting point. It opens with a toccata of multitudes of synths languishing like birds at anchor, but the favored device is the crescendo. The second and then third parts are thus moments of kinetic sound evoking a feverish, out-of-phase engine, then an alien factory with all its emissions and puffs, growing ever more deafening as the digital manipulations take hold.

The fourth part, in a way the heart of the work, resolutely builds up speed and volume, as if the first three parts had been nothing more than trial sketches of its physiognomy. It's an effective use of motorik, an apocalyptic locomotive. The fifth part unfortunately flattens it into banality. The sixth, the calmest, could be a fragment of the Grateful Dead's "Dark Star" brimming with aboriginal harmonics, sonic contortions and interference. The finale is coherent, just a roaring distortion that plunges everything back into entropy.

Recorded partly live in the studio and partly with overdubs. It shares with Tangerine Dream that typical way of bending sound sources – be they laptops, keyboards or guitars – to the most disparate expressive whims, blurring their identity, except here the speed is tripled, the conception sparsely rough-hewn yet incisive, the effect genuinely dazing and the execution a touch rough around the edges. It has the charm and the limits of imperfection, of a formative work with a wealth of details and observations still to be developed, swinging from highs of sublime psychedelia to lows of turmoil born of indecision. The first release on Handmade Supernova, C.A.R.M.A.'s label. Shortly followed by the even more adventurous "Crossed Flows At The Gates Of The Big Beyond" (2018).

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19/03/2018