Product Description
2 Essential Transcendence
3 Timeless
4 Mindful state
5 Impermanence, Everything Changes
6 Higher Existence
7 Inward Focus
8 Echoes of the Past
9 Spaceless
10 Everything Shines
Genres: Ambient, Experimental, Minimal
RIYL: William Basinski, H.U.V.A Network, Stelladrone, Rutger Zuydervelt
Chain D.L.K’s Vito Camarretta, writing about Zollo’s previous album: “The Italian sound artist’s release on Projekt Records is a delicate dance between simplicity and complexity, a masterclass in how to make minimalism feel both intimate and expansive. It’s the kind of music that thrives in the gaps between thoughts, where silence isn’t just golden — it’s practically close to sacred. Pietro Zollo may be working with simple tools—pianos, loops, fragments of sound—but what he’s created here is nothing short of a masterpiece. Or at the very least, it’s a reminder that sometimes the most profound experiences come from the simplest of means. And isn’t that a pattern worth repeating?”
On Abstraction, repetition becomes a meditative act, a means of amplifying the awareness of a specific sensation until a pure idea is perceived. Patterns in different timbres and rhythms recur, intertwine and overlap, intersecting as they create new arrangements and alignments.
“It’s a journey towards abstraction,” Zollo says, “an attempt to distill the sonic essence, to explore and get closer to the profound understanding of the unique and subjective emotions evoked. The musical elements alternate between harmony and tension: sometimes one figure prevails, overpowering the other, while in other moments they merge, creating new and unexpected motifs. This sonic dance between patterns that touch and intersect invites the listener to lose themselves in a flow of consciousness, as if each repetition were a step forward in the search for something ineffable, at the same time familiar and mysterious.”
Reviews Editor –
From This is Darkness
Abstraction by Pietro Zollo is one of the beautiful albums that stays with you long after it’s finished playing. The melancholic, minimalistic ambient soundscapes and slow evolving drones combine perfectly to create an incredibly rewarding and mesmerising listening experience. The music here is subtle, but multi-textured, and I found myself drawn to it again and again, losing myself in its depths each and every time. This is one of those albums to listen to, lying on the sofa, in a darkened room. Fantastic! -Rich Dodgin
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
[multi-album review]
Pietro Zollo is a composer of ambient / electronic / drone / minimalist music from Italy with nearly a dozen albums to his credit, though the three under review here represent releases from 2023 to 2025 on the Projekt Archive label. April from 2025 contains exactly three cuts of exactly thirty minutes each, titled “Part 1,” Part 2,” and “Part 3,” though the three longform looping sections seem to come from very different spaces, related only by their concept, the first full of sparkly percussives and resonant beauty that might indicate the final end of the long winter season with its rain and regeneration of life, a cycle we can reliably count on every year. The second part opens to a gentle and dreamy passage of time, where the listener can imagine seeds germinating and the life sprouting up from the earth, where one can almost hear angelic voices from on high guiding the process forward, while the third part is a bit less pastoral and more direct, even muscular in parts, driving home a more overt melodic abstraction. Beautiful, gentle, mercurial, and dreamlike are all adjectives that faithfully describe what Zollo is putting forward as a composer, although the exact 30-minute time limit of each section comes off as artificial with no apparent reason, some parts seem too long, while part three could last a full 90 minutes by itself and I wouldn’t mind at all. Since they are all exactly the same duration, one has to wonder how it might sound if you played all three parts at the same time?
So what does Zollo have in his toolbox to create all these magnificent sounds? The secrets are not given, though I suspect we might be hearing loops and samples of various sounds, piano going forwards and backwards, perhaps synthesizers and software instruments as well, although most of what is heard resembles nothing that’s easily identifiable, all of which brings us to Zollo’s 2024 offering, Fragmented Patterns. Here, he presents eight tracks of varying lengths, again seemingly built up from loops of sound of mysterious origin, creating a woven tapestry of beautiful textures that grow and blossom, though the overall feeling tends to be introspective and shimmeringly gentle, following soft structures that could suggest otherworldly moods and patterns, each piece bearing something wholly unique — a soft rhythmic element, colorful melodic elements, perhaps pure light and darkness swirled together into a blitz of starlight, one just needs to flow with it and go. In comparison to April, Fragmented Patterns seems more ambient and less of a minimalist exercise, though the deep reflections that capture the inward facing beauty and emotion of each of the eight pieces don’t need to be fully understood to be fully appreciated by the listener. Most of these just flow freely in any unexpected direction, although one piece in particular, “Imagination,” flows forward with a gentle cadence that’s subtle yet powerful.
Abstraction is Zollo’s entry for 2025 released on February 18th, and not to be confused with his earlier 2022 album titled Geometric Abstractions. This time out we get ten tracks total with sounds that are occasionally recognizable, like an accordion sample on the second track, “Essential Transcendence,” mixed in with a plethora of other interesting sonic samples, though the spirit and feeling throughout is still very much the same: ambient. Again, much of what is here is rooted in repeating patterns and loops, created under a general veil of mystery, although in a general sense I find Abstraction much easier to like than the earlier two, and especially April. Perhaps it’s because emotion tends to flow more freely and visibly, and some of the cuts here, like “Mindful State” for example, have a bit of cadence from an endless repeating loop) while still remaining true to the ambient ideal. Something seeming to be processed church bells seem to be ringing through a mysterious sonic cloud (more looped fragments, of course) on the near-eight minute “Spaceless,” while the wandering loops of “Timeless” seem to be an aural kaleidoscope, following circular pathways around an imaginary galaxy. Again, April, Fragmented Patterns, and Abstraction are three creations that encompass many powerful ideas, and enthusiasts of the ambient-minimalist sound would do well to investigate them. -Peter Thelen
Reviews Editor –
From Dave Aftandilian at Bandcamp:
At a time when it feels like we are assaulted by sensory overload all the time in real life and on our phones, this album instead calls to us with a whisper, a momentary glimpse, a fleeting feeling that both becomes more intense and recedes further into memory the more we try to hold onto it. Delicately lovely yet powerfully transformative.