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LP
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ZEIT 016LP
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Offering a visionary approach to the solo guitar, Milanese experimentalist Alessandra Novaga, delivers an expansive meditation on the late filmmaker, Derek Jarman, with I Should Have Been a Gardener, presented by Die Schachtel. Alessandra Novaga is among the leading figures within Italy's thriving new, experimental, and improvised music scene, consistently rendering striking solo efforts, as well as equally noteworthy collaborating with Stefano Pilia, Paula Matthusen, Elliott Sharp, Sandro Mussida, Travis Just, and others. Remarkably ambitious and forward-thinking, her approach to the guitar veers from the trajectories of visceral emotiveness and textural extended techniques that have held sway over the instrument's applications within avant-garde contexts over the last half century, encountering her relentlessly deconstructing and rethinking its unique properties through applications of structure, resonance, space, and tone. I Should Have Been a Gardener -- building on from the territory explored within 2017's Fassbinder Wunderkammer (2017) -- is Novaga's second LP to draw conceptually on her love for film. Rather than focusing on a fixed point of inspiration, the album takes form as a distillation, pulling from across the unique life, death, work, political commitment, and diaries of Derek Jarman. Emerging as an ethereal aural portrait of the man, sound -- interventions of tonality with non-instrumental sources -- and silence join in a single, unified body that seeks redemption and purification at the boundaries of life; an imprint that, like Jarman's garden at Prospect Cottage, is magical -- flowers blooming between the stones -- hovering in the stark space between an endless sea and post-modern shadow of a nuclear power plant. As remarkably listenable as it is challenging and pregnant with ideas, Novaga's I Should Have Been a Gardener represents a strikingly at ease step forward in the potentialities of experimental music. Bravely taking on the ubiquitous expectations of the guitar, Novaga refused to relinquish the clarity of source and sound, forcing the ear to rethink what is accepted and known at every turn. An immersive journey from one of Italy's most important contemporary voices. 180 gram, yellow vinyl; accompanied by an extensive, exploratory booklet; Edition of 200.
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LP
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BLUME 004LP
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Alessandra Novaga delivers a stunning LP, a compelling investigation of her resonantly spacious guitar playing that dismantles the instrument's unique properties through relentlessness. Movimenti Lunari speaks of the relentlessness of natural forces. Something that seems to have no development, but instead advances inexorably. A form developing out of a memory progressively coming into focus; never still, constantly pulsating and vibrating with new elements. Beyond any rational, analytic thought, a sound that belongs to remembrance. Sandro Mussida's "In Memoria" questions this relationship between movement and stillness in the form of a piece of music. The piece is a meditation on memory, technology, and sound; the repeating theme recalls bells chiming over and over, drawn out into lines as long as the horizon. Francesco Gagliardi's "Untitled, January" speaks of a sound evoked by an image. A photograph. A foggy landscape seen from a train. Accompanied by a single instruction: "A drone, or drones. Any duration." Simultaneously timely and timeless, Movimenti Lunari has the feel of artistic invention, a canvas of delicacy melding into intense streams of sound. Includes obi strip.
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