INDIAN WELLS - No One Really Listens To Oscillators

Some records carry considerable weight in musical terms, but they are also designed to convey an important message, often with a strong social dimension. “No One Really Listens To Oscillators”, the fourth album by Pietro Iannuzzi, aka Indian Wells, manages to describe, without a single word, the architectural incompleteness that too often plagues his native region, Calabria, a problem recently highlighted even by an article in the authoritative Wall Street Journal. Unfinished works, escalators built toward nothing, hospitals, car parks, schools: a series of cathedrals in the desert destined to remain abandoned forever, feeding the sense of disorientation of a territory that is already far from privileged in economic and social terms.

By injecting sensitive themes into his demanding sound design, Indian Wells delivers an album of undeniable value, one that is establishing him among Europe's finest in electronic music. The disturbed ambient of “An Escalator In A Storm” (the famous escalators placed in cosmic nothingness) is merely an unsettling prelude leading into the aggressive post-rave rhythms of the imperious “Four Walls”, “Habitat” and “Calabrian Woods” (three examples of minimal-techno-leaning Idm, ideally uniting the lessons of Jon Hopkins, Four Tet and Apparat), along with the decadent melodic touches (very Trentemoller) that wrap around the syncopated beats of “Against Numbers”, and the crescendo with darkwave hues that characterise the title track.

Alongside these “club” tracks (although nothing in these grooves was designed for the dancefloor), Indian Wells interlaces ambient pieces without beats, which nonetheless retain a constant underlying dramatic quality. This is the case of “Life Of JS”, dedicated to Judith Scott, a deaf artist and the creator of the heart pictured on the cover. It is also the case of the closing “Before Life”, written for Iannuzzi's daughter, born in 2020, and here too there is a heart, the one captured during the first ultrasound, which we can hear. Two female figures with one thing in common: both have Down syndrome. For all of this, “No One Really Listens To Oscillators” stands as a case study in the sublimation of the concept of Idm: “dance” music composed to move the mind.

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07/01/2023