Nicola Ratti’s second effort seems lodged in an unusual void. Without fail, Ratti exercises uncanny restraint to avoid making full statements. Rather, he skirts the edges of form, creating liquid silhouettes that morph and contract i waves, as they nurse and nudge awake deep buried banks of sound and memory.
It’s none too surprising that Ratti is also an architect. Although the works contain traces of the mercurial and imaginative qualities of improvisation, as well as hints of the satisfying structure that normally accompanies composition, they are first and foremost of a sculptural bent, clean, refreshing, and entirely without superfluous gesture.
Sometimes the music barely changes at all, though often just underneath it consists of microscopic fluctuations in sound – earthy guitar rumination, bass throbs, hovering samples of pitched and allusive sounds, vivid electronic clicks that accentuate the sonorities, all of which are only very occasionally briefly and dimly illuminated by auroral bursts of tone. “Cartographic Acrobat” is conjured from rippling layered guitar phrases, sparingly bowed and stroked cymbal, now and again augmented by an arco bass drone, until near the end a brief piano coda brings the proceedings to a close. The piece is colored by a disjointed melodicism, and a clipped impertinent glide, but it exists as a whole and, accordingly, the weight of the collective movement renders it densely expressive.
The murmur of Ratti’s deep yet soft voice returns time and again as a linking theme that restores order in an album that harbors as much tension as it does balance. It curls like smoke through “Volouta Musica”, a piece whose coin-spitting percussion and faint oscillating sound produces a gentle sense of chaos. The end result is a quietly masterful concoction. In under thirty-minutes, the album canvasses an impressive array of ideas and moods, without ever losing sight of its overarching architectural design.
Max Schaefer
