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12 CASSETTE BOX
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BLUME 021CS
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$119.00
PREORDER
RELEASE DATE: 5/12/2023
Blume Editions announce the release of Harmonic Crystals, one of the most ambitious bodies of recordings ever produced by the legendary Italian composer and multi-instrumentalist Roberto Laneri. Sprawling across 12 full-length cassettes, housed in a wooden box and accompanied by extensive explanatory liner notes by Laneri and numerous graphic scores by sound artist Agnese Banti -- who was also essential to the evolution of the project, also by recording, mixing and editing -- these remarkable extended vocal compositions represent a highpoint in a career that spans more than half a century. Drawing on the same foundations of cross-cultural and multi-temporal practice that defined his early efforts within the seminal avant-garde vocal collective, Prima Materia, across approximately 12 hours of material Harmonic Crystals presents minimal drone as a rigorous, evolutionary experimental process, imbued with a profound presence of humanity, drawing the ear toward the fundamental impulse to commune through sound. The inescapable power and scope of Harmonic Crystals presents a long overdue opportunity to reacknowledge a composer of singular vision working in our midst. Harmonic Crystals was composed by Roberto Laneri in collaboration with Agnese Banti, a sound artist, musician and overtone singer whose artistic activity has always been gravitating around choral music, soundscape studies, traditional music repertoires, composition for space and the collaborative dimension of music making. Recorded in Rome during the summer of 2019, presents four typologies of harmonic crystals -- a philosophical and structural approach deployed by the composer -- within which two-sound intervals converging on a common overtone (A2); three- to five-sound formations converging on a common overtone (A3, A4, A5). Harmonic crystals, as the composer explains them, are "points to an isomorphism between visual and harmonic crystals, in the sense that harmonic crystals behave in the world of acoustics the way crystals behave in the world of vision: whereas crystals can be rotated in order to transmit light in different ways, thus producing different effects and becoming suitable objects for meditation, the same result can be achieved by the manipulation of acoustic parameters such as frequency (e.g., beats), dynamics, ambiance, phasing, panning etc." seeking a kind of harmonic convergence where overtones of two or more voices converge on the unison or significant specific pitch formations, which creates trance inducing, otherworldly effects. Whether approached as a series of discrete works distributed over 24 sides of the box set's cassettes, or a single, sprawling continuum, Harmonic Crystals is a sonorous immersion with almost no precedent anywhere within the history of recorded music.
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CD
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BS 068CD
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Roberto Laneri's works always convey a clear artistic certainty: a total composer with an eclectic cultural background. In this latest adventure it seems to propose a kind of weird and curious exotica music; his Mediterranean ragas release glows and shadows, but the music plays more the plateaus of the Maghreb than the Indus Valley. Like a sorcerer piper, the sax shapes alchemy and hypnotic phrasing become: vague dances of camels, ecstatic progressions of an aboriginal vortex or a mystic Arabesque tropicalisms. He doesn't neglect his training as a jazz clarinetist, with gentle and smooth orchestral veins that are decidedly retrĂ² and old-style; remembering the dreamlike compositions of Nino Rota for Fellini's movies. There is no lack of esoteric voices from distant islands, Amazonian soundscapes, or rocking Brazilian moods. Laneri filters hidden traces of different traditions, creating unknown geographical syntheses without borders, furious extrapolations of compositional elements and famous themes misrepresentations. A visionary gaze, but also a good dose of ironic pleasure and fairytale humor. Not surprisingly, the original cover art of Noura Tafeche does nothing but suggest the idea of a tasty psychedelic fruit-salad.
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LP
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BS 068LP
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LP version. Roberto Laneri's works always convey a clear artistic certainty: a total composer with an eclectic cultural background. In this latest adventure it seems to propose a kind of weird and curious exotica music; his Mediterranean ragas release glows and shadows, but the music plays more the plateaus of the Maghreb than the Indus Valley. Like a sorcerer piper, the sax shapes alchemy and hypnotic phrasing become: vague dances of camels, ecstatic progressions of an aboriginal vortex or a mystic Arabesque tropicalisms. He doesn't neglect his training as a jazz clarinetist, with gentle and smooth orchestral veins that are decidedly retrĂ² and old-style; remembering the dreamlike compositions of Nino Rota for Fellini's movies. There is no lack of esoteric voices from distant islands, Amazonian soundscapes, or rocking Brazilian moods. Laneri filters hidden traces of different traditions, creating unknown geographical syntheses without borders, furious extrapolations of compositional elements and famous themes misrepresentations. A visionary gaze, but also a good dose of ironic pleasure and fairytale humor. Not surprisingly, the original cover art of Noura Tafeche does nothing but suggest the idea of a tasty psychedelic fruit-salad.
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LP
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BS 060LP
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Black Sweat Records present a reissue of Roberto Laneri's Anadyomene, originally released in 1987. The eclectic sensitivity of the composer Roberto Laneri (Prima Materia) looks unparalleled in the Italian avant-garde context. Anadyomene, published for the first time in 1987, shows the myth of Venus in a dystopian and dreamlike world. Laneri conceives a sound poem that opens up to the archetypal dimension of the water creation, through the symbol of bivalve conch, the myth of the feminine power is narrated thanks to the verses of the renaissance poet Angelo Poliziano. Creating a daring connection between Western and Eastern music, travelling on the Mediterranean Sea, the contemporary technologies and techniques revive and re-read ancient musical practices: contrapuntal structures and minimal electronic procedures venture into exotic analogies, strange Renaissance allusions, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean repertoires. Among otherworldly fairy voices, symphonic wandering pathos, aquatic disturbances, Indian Hindustani echoes, or psychedelic radiances. A special relationship between space and time, architecture and music, the manipulation of sounds conceived as the art of memory in its various meanings of preservation, transformation, and distortion.
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