The stated aim of the album is to incorporate music, broadly understood as jazz music, within the Spatialist and Nuclear Movement project(s). It is, therefore, perhaps a solid exegetical strategy, and possible point of entry, to spend some time looking at their project.
Both Spatialism and the Nuclear Movement (still active projects today) emerged from the avant-garde scene in post-war Italy. While various manifestos of intention were released, themes tended to centre around destruction, creation and technology. There is a stated and tangible antipathy to The Old Ways that merely aimed to entertain and please (in the perjorative senses of the word) ‘consumers’ of art. Spatialism and the Nuclear movement aimed to throw of this mediocritizing ‘crowd pleasing’ bent via various disruptive provocations – creation not for consumption, but for a sort of anti-consumption. Creation not for a mundane, borderline-anhedonic pleasure, but for discomfort. To this end, new methods of artistic expression, new mechanisms of artistic creation , were adopted (those that utilised state-of-the-art technologies were to be preferred), thus creating ever-new textures, colours, spaces and arrangements.
What would a musical equivalent to this be, and do Acqua Pesante succeed? From their album blurb, we are told that they wish to take Spatialism and Nuclear as a springboard in the following sense:
“The “Acqua pesante” project calls for the need for a new art, which “goes beyond traditional painting, sculpture, poetry and music”, without imposing formal solutions, but encouraging a new creative attitude: art that must update in accordance with the scientific-technological-anthropological evolution of the times.”
One would thus reasonably expect to hear something unified and familiar becoming stressed and deformalized, or perhaps something that begins in a completely ‘free’ fashion become pushed to its structureless limit, developing perhaps geometrically, evolving almost deterministically like a nuclear reaction. Is this what we find? To be honest, I can’t be sure…
The album starts off, to my ear, in a complete state of disunity. The appropriately labelled ‘Blind Instant Composition’ process works very well – the musicians at the beginning of the work sound like they’re playing masterfully, but at random, completely independently from each other. Were the progression of the project to move towards obtaining its stated goal, one would expect this effect to accelerate with each track. What one experiences, however, is a seemingly anastrophic process. The musicians by the end sound more coherent.
The opening track of the album initially sounds like someone cleaning the windows of a particularly untidy and chaotically arranged house. The texture of the sound is uncomfortable and restrictive; the music is incoherent, disordered, disorientating and, borderline stressful. This is, of course, no bad thing and it would be an enormous mistake to stop listening here. While the first track is saturating (Carlo Mascolo’s trombone is overwhelming in the intensity of its strangeness), track two is far more sedate, but no-less interesting. Giacomo Mongelli is able to express his virtuosity as a percussionist and Hernâni Faustino’s accompanying double-bass meeting Mascolo’s croaking trombone is truly an outstanding performance. The second track is probably my highlight of the album acting, if not as a palate cleanser, as a sort of bridge away from referentless noise and towards something more concrete and tangible, albeit complicatedly structured. By track three I was absolutely hooked and was able to make sense of what was going on.
While all the musicians are clearly superlative at their craft, it is probably Mascolo’s trombone playing that will stay with me and keep me returning to the album; the sounds were unusual and chaotic, enrapturing and confusing – I truly couldn’t wish for more.
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