It would be easy to supplant whatever I stated in my post for Nuno Canavarro’s Plux Quba and simply transport it here. If we include Roberto Musci & Giovanni Venosta’s Water Messages On Desert Sand, as another trafficking in that gorgeous unplaceable thing — then we can think of it as another forgotten reimagining of real life as a canvas for dreamy, meditative music. Water Messages On Desert Sand is an early example of a fortunate meeting when Plunderphonic ideas found a way to evolve with early, digital sampler technology’s promise.
Both Italian experimentalists, Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta had been composers who come from a lineage indebted to a few notable influencers. The music of the Third Ear Band, John Cage, moving next to ethno-musical foraging from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East easily are orbits circling the movements you’ll hear in Water Messages On Desert Sand. We might want to call this fourth world music but that might cheapen what they accomplish. Water Messages On Desert Sand is the product of a journey of sorts.
For a decade, from the mid ‘70s beyond, Roberto Musci had travelled across the world, recording tapes full of local, sonic ephemera. From chants to conversations, mundane to absorbing, on portable tape Roberto had amassed a wide breadth of sights and sounds from many locales but, creatively, was trying to find a way to integrate them into his own music. A keen guitarist, Roberto Musci had developed a taste for world music by listening to the likes of England’s Third Ear Band and Germany’s Popol Vuh. With experimental musician Giovanni Venosta, he was able to get an inkling of what might just be possible if they took their idea of rootless music further.
Together, in 1985, they collaborated on Giovanni’s debut titled Olympic Signals and used Roberto’s tape loops to create an interesting sound bed not unlike Brian Eno’s work with David Byrne in My Life In The Bush Of Ghosts, to background Giovanni’s minimalist music. Done on a very small budget, with no sampler at hand, on songs like “Woman In Late” and “Classic Comes Out” they capture a very Penguin Cafe Orchestra-vibe — music that doesn’t play up the exoticness of the samples but uses the sounds with reverence, to resignify them as new ideas to work with. As a whole, that album would present this intriguing side of Italian experimental or minimalist music that was aware that it could say a whole lot more if it gave itself some leeway to actually say more.
There were inklings of this possibility in Roberto Musci’s debut, The Loa Of Music, released in 1984. The Loa Of Music, found the Milanese multi-instrumentalist trying to adapt to, and use his ethnoforaged recordings as canvasses to create his nationless world music. Definitively more experimental and sprawling than what would follow, The Loa Of Music used samples as layers to build droning or ambient music around. A track like “Claudia, Wilhelm R and Me” did show what could happen if the distance between the experimental and the personal intersected further.
What 1987’s Water Messages On Desert Sand was important in showing is how the advent of cheap sampling technology, in this case E-MU’s EMAX sampler, allowed them to really rethink the idea of how you can make something of a certain place, truly unplaceable and deeply more affecting. Using the full extent of the EMAX’s 12-bit technology, Roberto and Giovanni, digitally piece together tracks from all sorts of disparate locales in ways that shift them from mere samples into actual tonalities and palettes. It was by this time that Roberto truly had come into his own, realizing how to blend the electronic with the acoustic, in a way that had meaning and was not just a thought exercise. Unencumbered by what they couldn’t actually do with these recordings, they did everything that could be done to them, to make them theirs.
One clearly hears the shift in tone, when one hears the a song like “Water Music”. As a child’s voice transforms through a musical gate, the laconic playing of Giovanni develops another sphere (one of nostalgia) that their original work didn’t quite have. It’s a powerful, pining tone that carries forward on songs like “Empty Boulevard” and “Nexus On The Beach”. By not simply relying on the sample to carry the song forward, on a song like “Mechanic Soul Versus Pathetic Ambient”, the duo pitch-shifts and granularly deconstructs the stamped wave as a form that has some plasticity to it — that can shift to almost elegiac height, even if we have no sight of how the original sample exists. If you’ve heard Paolo Modugno’s equally simpatico work, you have an inkling of what this means: organic synthesizing.
Without the EMAX sampler this isn’t possible, but the beauty lies far more in just how they sculpt the sonic form. It’s something that would later be evolved in Roberto’s own work away from the studio (on stage, video, or installations).
Songs like “Volterra”, “Malangaan”, and “Old Time Religion” take the limitations of said technology to its limits, only to use these limitations as affectations to ponder musically/deeply. Glitching, aliasing, and attempting to mimic tape techniques, they never quite do, but reshaping them with synthesis and signal processing treats them like a malleable form. The beauty of this music is that it gets to our modern situation, where current memories are now stuck in this digital storage bank, even if our regular lives are still impressively organic.
We can ignore it and say it’s not the same as the past, but there are certain charms and power, that only our present situation affords us the ability to appreciate. The appropriately titled, Music From Memory did Roberto Musci right by reissuing rare tracks on a compilation of his work, recently. In a way, this was music not made of instruments, but of memory. It’s largely that reason, I’d argue — an exact reason — it remains powerful still to this day.
One response
So good!