- A veteran composer based in the Milan area, Giuseppe Ielasi's background is in improvised music, but his recent work has shown him as much at ease in somewhat more premeditated compositional territory, creating site-specific soundscapes and even mucking about with ambient shades of minimal. Aix is Ielasi's "grid" album, a fact that's impossible to ignore, right down to the cover art. Its nine programmed mosaics are quite a departure from the gently rocking textures of his previous album for Taylor Deupree's 12k, 2007's August. Though they play as albums cut by the same artist, Aix's vertical architecture depends on repetition and combination where the widescreen August relied on duration and variation.
Regardless of the gridded formula's prominence, the album's lasting personality and color come courtesy of Ielasi's taste for certain acoustic instruments, insulating the grid conceit from the cold. In particular, Ielasi has had a career-long preoccupation with sounds conjured from the guitar. His predilection for the strum and twang is in plain view on Aix, but Ielasi devotes his attentions to other instruments as well, sampling music created on the piano, trumpet, harp and all sorts of percussive phenomena. Additionally, Ielasi's sonic arsenal includes tricks picked up in places way down the block from the conservatory, incorporating synthesizers, field recording and cloudy post-production effects.
The album opens with a handful of clipped sound snippets plotted graphically over an unhurried tick-tock of bass. Within two minutes, thankfully, a tight but melancholy loop of dusty keyboards blows in and softens the spare metronomic stiffness. With very little alteration of the ingredients, we're left with a laidback, surprisingly soulful groove that wouldn't sound out of place on a Prefuse 73 record. This more or less sets the tone for what follows: a collection of three- to four-minute vignettes that alternate between spare rhythms based on abrupt snatches of acoustic sounds and unabashed melodic prettiness rooted in jazz, pop, out-rock and chamber music.
This covers a lot of terrain, each of the miniatures standing out as distinct from the album as a whole. The second track stutters with plucks and taps, but a pensive piano loop winds through the third track, sounding like something you'd expect to hear in one of Jay Electronica's Hollywood-film-score-sampling productions. By the fourth song, Ielasi is tunneling through Microstoria terrain, but on the fifth he's shifted to a bubblegum micro-funk accented with prolonged organ tones. And so it continues, brushing against new touchstones and genres with each track, but adhering to the stacked-samples blueprint and retaining a steady tone throughout.
Though I wished at times for something a bit more peculiar, Aix is thirty minutes of lovely, evocative atmospherics. Decorative music crafted with an eye to concept and experimentation, it's intricate enough to seem almost descriptive, which seems natural for a composer so interested in site-specific music. Aix nestles into the background and doesn't demand attention, but won't be deterred as it gently steers to its very specific places. And they're very welcoming places.
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