Drone Records

AAL - Urania

Format: 5 x CDR BOX

Label & Cat.Number: AFE Records AFE50013

Release Year: 2007

Note: a lovely box collecting 5 albums (2000-2004) of this italian experimental / glitch / drone / field recording - artist, lim. ed 50 copies

Price (incl. 19% VAT): €30.00

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Epic release with collected material recorded 2000-2004 from this unusual Italian "experimental ambient" project! Comes in a lovely box! "Altogether this is a great work, showing a strong development, and AAL venturing into different kinds of music, which sometimes works and sometimes doesn't. Let's wait for the next box, to see where he leads us then." [FdW / Vital Weekly]

"AAL is Davide Valecchi from Florence, Italy. He started this project in early 2001 with the precious support of Paolo Ippoliti and Laura Lovreglio [a.k.a. Logoplasm, owners of the S'Agita Recordings label]. Davide had a classical piano training in his childhood and then he focused his attention on electric guitars before finally discovering electronic music in the early '90s. He released two Cyberpunk / EBM albums as Diagonal Chains and a Drum'n'Bass album as Solenoid. He was briefly part of the Industrial / Nu-Metal band GF93 and he still is the guitarist of Videodiva, a band dealing with a mixture of Dark-Wave, Rock and Electronics. After the privately self-released Ambient masterpieces "Disc1" and "Inherited and Partially Trasmitted", now available as a remastered double CD-R on Afe, aal's "13" was the very first CD-R release of the newborn S'Agita Recordings label. S'Agita also released aal's "Dear Dead Days" in 2002 and "In Luce" in early 2003. A Logoplasm / aal collaboration entitled "A Lifetime in a Blink" was also relesead on A La Verticale De L'Étè, a S'Agita Recordings sublabel. aal was conceived as an embodiment of a 'stream of consciousness', in which memories, dreams and portions of reality are mixed and cannot be separated. Electronics, concrete sounds and data flux try to evoke these elements following an istinctive course.
The "Urania" box-set collects five full-lenght albums played, recorded and produced by aal between 2000 and 2004: "Disc2", "Disc3", "Composita solvantur", "Delicate Debris" and "Engine Summer". All music was carefully remastered by aal and Andrea Marutti between 2006 and 2007 on purpose of this release.
"La Ruina", the sixth disc which completes this limited edition box-set, is sold separately and is only available on demand: each copy is personally finalized by the author himself.
Here's a description of each and every album according to aal's own words:
"Disc2" represents a collection of sounds recorded between 2000 and 2001 that can be considered the very first attempts at defining a sound entity called aal. Synths, effect modules, tape recorders, microphones and samplers were used following an instinctive approach in order to depict abstract places and feelings. "Disc3" deals intensely with the concept of altering streams of sound in real time. These tracks are mainly improvised music whose base consists of sound sources like radio and television transmissions, shortwaves and analogic tape recorders filtered live by sound processors and samplers. They were recorded at night assuming that the captured transmissions were coming from space. "Composita Solvantur" is a four movements composition each part of which can be considered as a static description of the same place viewed from a different angle. This place is definitely elsewhere, even when it represents a place of the mind. "Composita Solvantur" was titled, as a tribute, after the book by the poet Franco Fortini. "In Exitu" is the title of an hallucinating novel by Giovanni Testori and stands here as a tribute, too. "Delicate Debris" represents a deep rework of sound sources produced by acoustic instruments like piano, guitar, flutes and mandolin and it deals with the essence of loss. These sounds testify a research into sound creation, the will to discover new methods of intervention on aural documents in order to create new meanings, new places, new emotions. "Engine Summer" was recorded right after the 2003 S’Agita release "In Luce" and it is fed by the same inspiration. Memories and their remains are the subject of this album: memories that are not necessary real. Memories that enlighten the golden path of reminiscence. The title is a tribute to a John Crowley’s novel by which this album is partially inspired.
"La Ruina" is a collection of ten voices of water captured with stereo microphones along different locations of the stream of the same name. This little river's voice has been my discreet companion during my childhood years." [label info]

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