Roberto Musci - Tower Of Silence 2xLP

Label: Music From Memory

Our Review:

Beginning in 1974, the Italian musician Roberto Musci started traveling throughout Africa, the Middle East, India and elsewhere in Asia. During his journeys, he would collect field recordings and study various musical traditions from those particular regions, adopting and manipulating those sounds into his own electronic scores. His chimera of modern technologies with these non-western elements paralleled the "fourth world" recordings of ethnomusicologically non-placed compositions that Jon Hassell produced through his highly influential recordings in the late '70s and early '80s. Tower Of Silence is an anthology of material that was composed from 1983 up to the present day, including a number of collaborative tracks and various previously issued albums. Despite the vast timeframe for this collection, Tower Of Silence maintains a uniform sound for a quasi-mystical sense of tranquility and meditation. These earnest recordings might adopt the vocal chants from Ghana or the dervish percussive patter from Morrocan Sufis or the mesmerizing harmonic ragas from the subcontinent. In turn, his hypnotic, relaxed compositions of percussive objects, wind-chimes, airy flutes and looped field recordings skitter somewhat painterly across surfaces of dreamtime ambience and fretless bass motifs.