GALATI - Dust

Roberto Galati has given us a remarkable string of LPs in recent years, blending the theme of extreme journeys immersed in the wildest nature with ambient music. If those albums were about the ecstasy of glimpsing a world with timescales infinitely longer than a single human life, mountain ranges so immense and ancient as to surpass the very concept of time a single man can grasp, "Dust" tackles the opposite: the ultimate crumbling into dust of even that which, to the human mind, might seem eternal.

The almost physical relationship with landscape partly fades, and the layers and distorted drones become the soundtrack to an immensely long but unstoppable span of time, one that will lead even the most imposing mountain range to its inevitable disappearance. It is no longer the landscape seen from afar in its entirety, no longer the extremely vast that is the subject, but the extremely small: the stone slowly crumbling into dust. This sense of density is reinforced by the mastering of Rafael Anton Irisarri, whose touch is clearly felt in the depth of the sound and the spatiality of the textures.

Galati's music changes here, becoming sharper and more immediate. There are no long preambles: the tracks get straight to the point, with sudden synth notes ("Worn By The Wind, Lost To The Ages") kicking off compositions in an almost unexpected way ("Dreams Lay Buried"). Noise and ghostly melodies coexist before dissolving into notes wandering into nothingness ("The Ephemeral Grit Of Time"), or reassembling into impenetrable walls of sound ("Millions And Millions Of Years"), or again into melancholy nocturnal melodies ("Enchanted By These Silent Ruins").

This duality (serenity and chaos) reaches its apotheosis in the closing pairing of "The Ephemeral Grit Of Time" (the only entirely acoustic track) and "Storm Of Stones" (an immersion into disintegrating chaos). That disintegration can be felt in the sparse guitar notes of "A Moment When Nothing Happens And Everything Is Revealed", which build a hazy atmosphere destined to fade away, swallowed by a sea of electronic dust.

Music that is, once again, a metaphor for something else: a sonic reflection of images evoking timeless feelings.

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09/03/2026