Product Description
2 Dark Water Swinging Lights
3 Third Eye Lantern
4 In the Realm of Curiosity
5 Cave Chasm Recall
6 The Enchanted Inner Plateau
7 Glowing in the Depths
8 A Fragile Dialogue of Waters
9 Cave Chasm Recall (Edit) ← digital only
Purchase in Europe for fast, inexpensive shipping: Information in English here. Click to order CD. |
Limited edition of 500
Genres: Ambient, Organic Ambient, Meditation, Relaxation, Electroacoustic improvisation
The third collaborative work from Italian artists Alio Die and Lorenzo Montanà is an electro-acoustic rumination upon the shimmerings of water. The refined electronics perfectly integrate with the sounds of acoustic origin — the magic is enthralling. The sonorities of original ethnic instruments such as the psaltery, the rebab (a low stringed instrument similar to the lute, with resonating strings), and the duduk combine with the understated textures of synths, drones and loops. The eight pieces move through pure ambient streams, almost ancestral, evolving out of time. It’s a fluid, beatless territory that drifts, in the course of seventy minutes, through pure ambient vistas and the call-to-prayer feel of sacredly inspired music.
Alio explains, “The eight musical creations from the deep reaches of the earth push to the sky with extreme mastery and power. The symbiosis of the colors of the soundscapes reflects the extreme specularity of the palette Lorenzo and I each bring to the work as companions of poetry, chasing and blending without stopping among the chasms of the abyss up to the top of the highest mountains. The water cycle traverses every realm of existence. It breathes life into the earth from gaseous regime to flowing fluid to glacial crystal. It’s nature as a vital balm also allows you to absorb the information, the pattern, the rhythm of the material it encounters on its way. It is the place of immersion. The cycle of life but also the cycle of a sensitive identity, so we become continuously. The temple of life is built on the water cycle which expresses and lays the foundations of any biological connection. In the dialogue of the water the light rays are reflected, the colors of the sky and of the green, the perfume after the rain, or after a snowfall, the mists and the rainbows, the dew, the tears.”
The semi-ritual echoes of Dialogue of Water connect within a spectrum of meditation and emotional soundscapes. The boundary is liquid: the perfect translation of a perpetual flow veiled by a surrounding graceful mood.
BIOS
Alio Die is Stefano Musso’s shimmering, expansive dronescaping solo-project. Creating under the moniker since 1989, Musso released over 70 albums including fruitful collaborations with artists such as Robert Rich, Vidna Obmana, and Amelia Cuni. His personal musical signature is a hybrid between sonorous soundscapes and acoustic mysticism: a shadowy, cavernous, intensely detailed fusion of acoustical elements, sample treatments, sparse, echoing percussion, and deep, atmospheric sound design.
Lorenzo Montanà is a musician, producer and sound engineer who began his sonic explorations in the early 90s. He published a 5-CD series (Labyrinth) with Pete Namlook of FAX Records and worked as a soundtrack composer whose work landed in the trailer of The Hunger Games 1 & 2, Blade Runner 2049 and more. With four solo albums on Projekt, this is Lorenzo’s third collaboration with Alio Die on the label.
“…the glistening shimmering sounds of acoustic instrumentation mingling freely with synth textures, found sounds, all swirling in a powerful, magical sonic stew.” -Peter Thelen, Exposé
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Reviews Editor –
From Exposé
Whenever one sees the name Alio Die on a recording (real name = Stefano Musso), it’s guaranteed to be something exceptional, a piece of warm floating ambient music steeped in amazing beauty. I have yet to be proven wrong on that. Similarly, Lorenzo Montanà is a name that can be trusted, a masterful producer and composer of dozens of soundtracks, his ambient works flow with warmth, feeling, and grace. With both of these artists working together in a collaboration, one has the best of everything. Dialogue of Water is the third such collaboration on the Projekt label, following Holographic Codex (2015) and more recently, The Threshold of Beauty (2019), both of which are stunning examples of flowing sound sculptures.
The seven pieces presented here combine exotic acoustic instrumentation with a strong ethnic flavor with gentle textural elements, synths, drones, electronics, and loops, with occasional deep percussives. How the elements combine and work together offer a seemingly endless variety of introspective, reflective sounds that rarely duplicate or repeat. Nearly a year in the making, the recording was completed in December 2022, with the post-production work done in the months that follow. For his part, Alio Die is credited with zither, psaltery, rebab, duduk, loops, and drones, bringing much of the Eastern flavor that one hears in the pieces. Montanà brings piano, synthesizers, electronics, string textures, samples, and programming. The pieces vary in length from a mere four minutes to well over fifteen, though all are equally effective and powerful, with the glistening shimmering sounds of acoustic instrumentation mingling freely with synth textures, found sounds, all swirling in a powerful, magical sonic stew. Hardly a second floats by where the richness, depth and expansive nature of this thoroughly immersive blend of mystical sounds doesn’t call forth some kind of spiritual response from the listener. I probably said something similar about their two previous releases, and of course I meant it just as much then as I do now regarding this latest cosmic joint-effort. -Peter Thelen