PIETRA TONALE - Disco Uno

Just a few months after the personal creative peak of Giulia Impache's solo work, “In:Titolo” (2025), the Pietra Tonale collective presents itself in full and in all its alchemical, instrumental splendor with “Disco uno”: “Devotion” expands on the extraterrestrial easy listening of Air, slipping into distorting spatiotemporal rifts, while “Aix To Mun”, teetering on drastic non-sequitur, starts out somewhat awkwardly deconstructing Penguin Cafe Orchestra, then turns into a satanic space-rock ballet, before settling back into chamber-music elegy and finally dissolving into trills over electronic syncopations. “Petricore” is their tag, the manifesto of their style, barely two minutes of their own brand of “hardcore”, in which every available means is exploited at maximum intensity.

When Impache herself steps into the spotlight playing the role of a frontwoman sui generis, what emerges is a lied stripped bare by dissonance over a minimalist tribal electronic pattern, such as “Selce”, and a decadent psalm in the vein of Ruggiero, built on electroacoustic fragments (with a heavy dose of violin) such as “Sar Oh Dedida”, where everyone ends up sounding like the softest version imaginable of Can (or a certain Jane Siberry from her “No Borders Here” period), stepping into a new dimension.

On “Ronzeze” she whispers the way Liz Fraser might, while staging a dub pantomime of witches' sabbaths. “Nap” pushes “Selce” to the furthest extreme of its possibilities, a cauldron of radio signals, wails, and orchestral downpours, while a lazily unhurried jazz theme gradually coalesces beneath it.

First album conceived and recorded by the Turin-based "orchestra collective", who had nevertheless already shown excellent improvisational chops on the in-studio live sessions "Orcheisthai" (2021) and "3 Textures" (2021), as well as the half-hour works "Coetus 343" (2022) and "Il gioco della campana" (2023). Three main threads run through it: downtempo in symphonic guise, the recently patented jazz big-band sound, and electronic reworkings. It's a fascinating, unpredictable maze of techniques and handwritings (and languages sung in), charged with innovation and rich in extreme arranging refinements. Not to mention the exploration of timbre (just listen to the two "Melodia" tracks). What's perhaps missing is a真正 standout centerpiece track, and it's certainly not the almost forced inclusion of the ballad "In Iterpo Elo" (2024), already released as a single co-written with Impache. But there's still "Petricore". One conductor (Simone Farò) for thirty musicians.

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10/08/2025