VA: Michelangelo Antonioni - Trilogy And Epilogue
and/OAR

Michelangelo Antonioni's filmography offers such a rich source of imagery and themes it's a wonder no experimental music project has appeared until now based upon it. All credit goes to and/OAR, then, for choosing the Italian auteur as the third in its film director series (previous volumes honoured Andrei Tarkovsky and Yasujiro Ozu), with the two-disc set, formally titled Michelangelo Antonioni - Trilogy and Epilogue, focusing on L'Avventura (1960), La Notte (1961), L'Eclisse (1962), and Deserto Rosso (1963). Antonioni is, of course, the master of ennui and alienation whose works are populated by wandering souls who either vanish altogether (L'Avventura) or co-exist but with the littlest of connection to one another. Not surprisingly, he preferred that his films be generally unencumbered by music's presence, believing that his stories would breathe better without such interference; in that regard, Giovanni Fusco, whose music appears in most of Antonioni's films from the late 1950s to the early ‘60s, apparently declared, “The first rule for any musician who intends to collaborate with Antonioni, is to forget that he is a musician!”

A few other background details are worth noting before turning to the contents of the release itself, specifically Antonioni's sensitivity to the importance of natural sounds—what he regarded as the “true music” of a film—and the pioneering electronic music that Vittorio Gelmetti contributed to Deserto Rosso. Such dimensions of the director's work draw a clear line connecting the artists featured on and/OAR's recording, all of whom in one way or another share like-minded sensitivities to environmental sound and to the role of electronics in current music-making practices. The set features over two hours of lower-case, electroacoustic works peppered with the kinds of pregnant pauses and empty spaces that characterize Antonioni's films. Some of the pieces (all untitled) are heavily electronic in nature (Marc Behrens' turbulent setting, Antti Rannisto's throbbing drone), while others inhabit an interzone where acoustic instruments (clarinet, cello), natural sounds (industrial creaks, cavernous rumbling), and electronic manipulations reside. The artists involved will be familiar to those conversant with the microsound genre, with figures such as Roel Meelkop, Ben Owen, i8u, Lawrence English, Steinbrüchel, Jason Kahn, and Tomas Phillips taking part. The piece by Pali Meursault (with Ici-Même) stands out as one of the settings that is most rich in outdoor sounds, with train clatter, traffic noise, and bird sounds threading their way into the mix. Richard Garet's sub-lunar exploration sounds like the essence of La Notte and L'Eclisse distilled down to a seven-minute form. Dale Lloyd's brief piano rumination arrives as a breath of fresh air amidst such abstractions, as does Marihiko Hara's at album's close.

April 2011