Product Description
2 The Waiting Grounds
3 Eerie Serenity
4 The Unseen Future
5 The Cloud Sculptors
6 Deep End
7 The Future is Now
8 The Garden of Time
9 Within the Boundless
10 Synthetic Horizons
Genres: Ambient, Experimental, Minimal
RIYL: William Basinski, H.U.V.A. Network, Stelladrone, Rutger Zuydervelt
The Future is Now is a grounding, emotional work from Italy’s Zollo. On his 16th album, he takes the building blocks of repetition and looping patterns, evolving it far beyond all confines into an organic tapestry of introspective and warmly engaging tracks that grow and blossom, intertwining and overlapping to reveal new arrangements and alignments.
CHAIN DLK wrote about last year’s Fragmented Patterns, “…there’s a kind of emotional sleight of hand at play, where you think you’re listening to the same thing over and over, only to realize that everything has shifted, and you’re now in a completely different place, both musically and emotionally. Zollo has created an album that is both deeply introspective and endlessly intriguing. It’s the kind of record that reveals new secrets with every listen, provided you have the patience to sit with it, to let the loops work their magic.”
Pietro discusses the album’s emotional core:
Years ago I enjoyed reading science fiction books, and I read many of the most diverse genres. In particular, I was fascinated by stories that tried to imagine the not-too-distant future: the evolution of the human race and the effects of technology.
We do not live on other planets or coexist with extraterrestrials, we do not travel interstellar distances or through time, we do not have flying cars, and we do not live for centuries, but we can communicate instantly with anyone anywhere on the planet, talk to machines, and even confide in them. Many of these things had already been imagined and described, not exactly as they are today, but in essence, in the books I once read.
I didn’t consider them prophets, but I always felt admiration and a melancholic sympathy for authors who tried to project their thoughts into the future.
I haven’t been involved with this literary genre for many years, but some ideas have stayed with me. In writing this album I followed the feeling that now, in the present we are living in, some visions of the futures that were imagined have become tangible. Part of what was imagined as the future is happening now.
On The Future is Now, this empathy for artists who looked beyond their time translates into simple melodic phrases that repeat and intertwine to represent possible combinations of tomorrow. Distorted futuristic visions become background noise, the faint hope of a better future mingles in dissonance with the fear of a frightening future.
Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
The science fiction tomes and films of yesteryear often predicted a radical future with technologies like instant teleportation, flying cars, routine interplanetary travel, lifespans of hundreds, or even thousands of years, the ability to travel forward and backward in time, and much more. Most of those predictions have yet to come true, maybe further off into the future they will, or maybe never! Certainly one fact is true — yesterday’s future is now, even if it’s not what we were hoping for or expecting. That is the premise of Pietro Zollo’s latest album (his sixteenth), The Future Is Now. The ten instrumental tracks herein offer powerful, yet delicate imagery in a variety of ways, building structures from loops and synthesis, a gentle evolutionary fabric that immerses the listener in some introspective soundworld, often built on gentle melodies and pastel colors, other times on gentle floating waves and spacious evocations, all the while remaining warm and subtle, never edgy and treacherous. Much like an labyrinthine soundtrack to some mystical future, each of the ten pieces here follows its own unique pace and projects a different feeling that a listener can absorb, each a sheer work of minimalist beauty. Some pieces, like the opener “The Delta at Sunset” and the title track, are propelled by a simple melodic structure on a muted piano that eventually blossoms into shimmering beauty, while others like “The Unseen Future,” “Within the Boundless,” and “Deep End” offer a sound more akin to classic floating ambient, built from slow-evolving loops and overlapping drifts of subtle vapor. When I think of the three previous Pietro Zollo releases I reviewed earlier this year (April, Fragmented Patterns and Abstraction), this latest release doesn’t find a convenient comparison there, yet it seems to follow a similar trajectory in that each piece reveals itself slowly as a matter of course. -Peter Thelen