(New Album Review) Pleq and Giulio Aldinucci- The Prelude To

Pleq (Polish producer Bartosz Dziadosz) makes rhythmic electronic music positioned at the fringes of ambient music and sound art for its melancholy aesthetic and samplings from modern classical sounds. He is also an extremely congenial and open-minded collaborator with those who focus completely on ambient sounds, as evidenced both by Adrift, his 2012 meeting with Hakobune, and now The Prelude To, a collaboration with Italian sound artist and musician Giulio Aldinucci just released on Twice Removed’s younger sibling, Long Story Recording Company. Aldinucci (whose work focuses on incorporating field recordings with digital and analog synthesis) also just released the excellent Spazio Sacro; the guy’s on a roll and I’m very curious to see where he will venture next! The Prelude To (which began as a one-off for a Home Normal compilation) also features three engaging remixes by Olan Mill (Alex Smalley and Svitlana Samoylenko), Christopher Bissonnette, and The Green Kingdom (Mike Cottone).

The Prelude To is beatless ambient where, here and there, a bright ray of light and chilly gust of air will sometimes shoot through the thick fog of blurred tones made up of distorted field recordings, acoustic instruments, and synthesized sounds.  This is not to say that the end result is muddled– the intuitively harmonious collaboration at the heart of  The Prelude To has produced soundscapes in which Pleq’s loops and faded white noise and Aldinucci’s ringing, slowly-ascending drones orbit so closely that they form a seamless whole. The sum of this collaboration is something halfway-between the arctic ambient of Biosphere and the meditative sound art made by contemporaries of Aldinucci like Stephan Mathieu. This one comes highly recommended to all fans of ambient music and sound art.