Luciano Basso – Cogli Il Giorno (1978)
Basso’s
first record, Voci, was nice enough, in a keyboard-driven prog sort of way, but with just enough instrumental diversity and ideas to go round.
This one sounds more like what someone studying piano at the
conservatory, who's been past the Romanticism and is now taking 20th century music classes, might put out proposing to break aesthetic barriers pretty
much in tatters by the late 1970’s (when this came out), after a decade or so of musical free-for-all, from all sides of the barricades.
Taking away the apparently forward-thinking embellishments (like a wailing soprano or a stray oboe or bassoon, à la some of King Crimson's Islands (not necessarily the best bits of it); or a sitar, à la a million other things in that guru-ridden day and age), which are occasionally there to provide a distraction from its compositional foundations (with which they hardly entail a significant dialogue), at the heart of this lies a tonally single-minded barrage of heavy-handed arpeggiated piano chords, whose clatter can sometimes get so metronomic and, particularly, so loud in the mix (a remastering could do it some good), that, after a while, it might start to resemble a form of enhanced interrogation, like it's hammering your aesthetic faculty into submission. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, and against your better judgement, you ended up finding yourself with no other choice but to swear that “yes”, this is “pretty”.
Taking away the apparently forward-thinking embellishments (like a wailing soprano or a stray oboe or bassoon, à la some of King Crimson's Islands (not necessarily the best bits of it); or a sitar, à la a million other things in that guru-ridden day and age), which are occasionally there to provide a distraction from its compositional foundations (with which they hardly entail a significant dialogue), at the heart of this lies a tonally single-minded barrage of heavy-handed arpeggiated piano chords, whose clatter can sometimes get so metronomic and, particularly, so loud in the mix (a remastering could do it some good), that, after a while, it might start to resemble a form of enhanced interrogation, like it's hammering your aesthetic faculty into submission. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if, at some point, and against your better judgement, you ended up finding yourself with no other choice but to swear that “yes”, this is “pretty”.
