(New Album Review) Giulio Aldinucci- Spazio Sacro

Spazio Sacro, the new album from sound artist Giulio Aldinucci, is covered in a thick gauze of effects that make the slightest gestures reverberate endlessly, if only to amplify their relationship to the steadily beating heart beneath. Aldinucci, who began learning music as a child,  writes music for acoustic instruments, but his fine last three albums Aer, Tarsia, and now Spazio Sacro, were synthesized more from field recordings and tones generated from digital and analog hardware. The pieces on Spazio Sacro were culled from childhood memories from rural Tuscany.

One could relate the timbres of Aldinucci’s pieces to those of Simon Scott and Marsen Jules, yet the almost disorienting flurry of dreamily altered scenes and fragments layered over the minimal composition forms an overall style that is hyper-evocative and more musically emotive than their work, almost demanding the listener to search for the secrets held within. The swelling chords and drones evoke the vastness of this landscape just as much as the mystic traditions that have coexisted with it– the album creates a conversation between the epic ambiance of this environment’s accumulated history and its author’s memories. Spazio Sacro is a musically affective and sonically imagistic electro-acoustic work, and certainly the best work that Aldinucci has done to date. This release comes highly recommended to fans of sound art and modern classical music.

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