HOW TO CURE OUR SOUL – Luna

Low Point

This Italian duo was unfamiliar before I was sent their release by Low Point’s generous honcho Gareth Hardwick. Marco Marzuoli and Alessandro Sergente belong to the category of so-called “audiovisual artists”; a danger nowadays, if you ask me. How much musical mediocrity sheltered by brain-numbing installations can a poor reviewer tolerate? However we were sufficiently fortunate this time. In fact, Luna is a quietly seducing offer for stratified guitars, sampling pedals and manipulated tapes that starts unassumingly and flourishes gradually – and rather glowingly – across three movements. Let’s now stress the old story according to which certain drone albums work wonders on selected listeners, whereas others don’t even manage to tickle their concentration, being dismissed as low-budget wallpaper after a few minutes. HTCOS succeeded in eliciting pleasurable aural illusions in their pseudo-static textures while remaining at safe distance from the excesses of consonant falseness characterizing various hallowed names dabbling in this type of environment. Marzuoli and Sergente did the job by letting the strings clash a bit and muffling the higher frequencies, thus originating that minimum of “throbbing turbulence” in between the contiguous tones that is sorely absent from other kinds of make-believe Om, vocal or less. The final track “Night Climb To The Mount Analogue” is perhaps the most gratifying, but the whole album – lodged on a 40-minute cassette – is commendable.