A masterpiece, unspeakable. My favorite release of 2016 and something I will always return to.

Despite starting to play music in 1978, Italy's Giancarlo Toniutti hasn't released much over the thirty-eight years. Including his earliest cassettes there have been, according to discogs, fourteen releases, two mini CDs and a retrospective box set on the honourable Vinyl On Demand of his early cassettes releases.When Toniutti started he played with Tiziano Dominighini as a duo, which they named "airthrob in" (the quotation marks are part of the name) of improvised music, using a synthesizer, a guitar, sound effects and electro-acoustic sound sources. Later in his career Toniutti only used acoustic sounds and analogue treatments. This new release is in fact old and new; let me explain in less words than Toniutti uses in the twenty pages of the booklet, which are actually an excellent read (and I might add, a little less difficult than one expects from him, judging his earlier releases). In 1981 and 1982 Toniutti and Dominighini recorded a bunch of musical improvisations with the intention to use them in a sound installation that would also involve urban sounds, mainly that of human intervention, rather than non-human, and all of this presented on the same level, volume-wise. The proposed idea back then for the installation didn't happen, and the project remained unfinished. In 2013 Toniutti discovered two of the unfinished pieces with Dominighini and decided to finish the project now adding recordings of the countryside, albeit near a highway. That is the composition that is now released and it lasts sixty-five minutes. Maybe from my description it sounds all so so interesting, but these sixty-five minutes sound great. One long monolith of sounds, from the nearby highway droning and droning, the endless parade of cars and wind (no doubt), and every now and then there is the music, now no longer on an equal level as the rest (as originally intended), but instead hoover in the background; it might also be the way the music is played. That is something we don't know at this point. Sometimes the music sounds like a radio tuner coming in from a far and we hear something that reminds me of a violin, but most of the time everything is vastly obscure, but it blends in well with the highway sounds. The development of this piece is very minimal, even when after repeated playing I think there are various parts to be detected in this piece. Toniutti, for it is him only who completed this project, changes a bit in the colouring of the sound, sometimes allowing the music to rise up and on other instances changes the volume of the environment, created a work that is entirely alike what Toniutti does, completely outside of any fashion or trend, and it is another beauty. One could only wish he did a bit more releases. (FdW)