Dusted Reviews Artist: Valerio Tricoli Album: Metaprogramming From Within The Eye Of The Storm Label: Bowindo Review date: Mar. 22, 2007

Valerio Tricoli is one quarter of Bologna's 3/4HadBeenEliminated. This is his second solo record for the Italian label collective Bowindo. Whereas 3/4HadBeenEliminated reimagines psychedelia through the lens of musique concrète, this is an intense investigation of disembodied perception in the form of a single electroacoustic composition - an uncomfortable calm inhabited by hints of signals and actions, interspersed with sudden jarring events, sometimes moving slowly and seductively, sometimes shifting the listener from one location to another.

Despite the sparseness of its material, the sense of location and of movement from place to place is remarkable. Tricoli manages to create a labyrinth of recorded and imagined states through abstract means; there is none of the parading around of "field recordings" here to push the listener's buttons. Instead, all the tension, the conviction that one is being led through a maze, stems from the comparitive use of direct and reflected sound. Doors are opened, spaces expand slowly or implode with violent gesture, but all of it's suggested by cinematic juxtaposition and a cunning sense for suggesting distance - ghost-like electronic tones, reverberations of impulses long dispersed, fragments of non-vocal sounds before and after utterances.

Tricoli is a master of the suspense between actions. Half a minute before the piece makes its grand appearance, a single hum of a voice is heard and soon forgotten, but the album closes with the same, short disconnected murmur, recorded with such close presence that it suddenly feels as if someone has been standing next to you throughout the CD's duration.

By Daniel Sorenson

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