Algida Bellezza is Alessandro Tedeschi‘s seventh album for Glacial Movements and it is another release that fits perfectly into their oeuvre. Over five mistily submerged tracks, a bleak, monochrome landscape is evoked through the slow moving actions of Netherworld‘s electronic drones and mysterious unseen sounds that lurk in the flailing snow storms that envelope the fractured pieces on offer here.
This is how I imagine a slow trek through the Arctic would unfold, with whiteout conditions turning the visibility to zero and having to rely on hearing and smell to guide your way; but for all the blizzards, there are moments of clarity when the storms stop and suddenly a breathtaking vista of ice and mountain unfolds before you. Wrapped in warm clothes, dragging a sled, this is your soundtrack.
Everything is opaque, nothing is really clear and the slow drone scours the landscape, all grey and white with hints of the very edges of blue. It is this absence of colour, something which we in more temperate areas take for granted, that is so well represented here; but at one point on “Somniosus Microcephalus”, the sounds resemble an underground train passing through a frozen station. The whine of the electric motor, the monotonous sound of the track joints, the squeals and thrums of the body moving through narrow spaces as the vibrations make their way into the seating area, the whole things a smorgasbord of sound that also contains imagined warmth from the external chill. It isn’t all comforting though. The slow, dark, cavernous metallic elements of “Orcinus Orca” clash like scaffold poles loose in a sea of ghostly, almost human groans that upset the ambience. The light and dark, the known and unknown are unwelcome bedfellows as the album progresses. Your senses definitely aren’t always to be trusted as the metallic slashing in “Ursus Maritimus” sits in the distance, muffled and mesmeric; the sound of a descent into unreality, again the blurring of light and dark, form and phantasm taking place before you, but unwilling to be confronted.Algida Bellezza is at times disconcerting, but in the comfort and warmth of your own home, it is worth allowing this series of blurred soundscapes take you to some unexpected places.
-Mr Olivetti-
