Gianluca Becuzzi & Fabio Orsi: The Stones Know Everything
Digitalis

Utilizing guitars, laptop, and “old keyboards,” Naples-based Fabio Orsi and fellow sound sculptor Gianluca Becuzzi spread eight simultaneously epic and immersive drone settings across The Stones Know Everything's two discs. In this second chapter in a trilogy that began with 2006's Muddy Speaking Ghosts Through My Machines (A Silent Place), Orsi and Becuzzi transmute a vast range of sounds, field or otherwise, into engrossing environments of industrial and spectral character. Digitalis compares The Stones Know Everything to a “field of glass on top of a quiet lake” and the simile's not far wrong, given the degree of finely calibrated precision and textured detail Orsi and Becuzzi bring to the recording's ninety minutes. Billowing like slow-moving cloud formations, the material expands and contracts in time-suspended splendour.

Electric guitars strum alongside layered flurries of organ tones in “The History Knocks My Bedroom Door” unlike “Another Night Is All Around” which, dominated by the jagged shards, screeches, and scrapes of an abused guitar, wends a noisier route. Interestingly, though it's likely coincidental, “Another Day Is Fade Away” sounds uncommonly similar to the steely, electric guitar-based ambiance Howard Shore deploys in his soundtrack for David Cronenberg's 1996 film Crash . On disc two, the twenty-minute “Lights from The Middle of Nowhere (Part One)” juxtaposes rough scraping noises to a magisterial theme that exudes a rather Scottish character. Calling the pieces drones errs somewhat as they're hardly static; in the latter piece, for example, a quiet piano melody moves to the forefront at the fourteen-minute mark but it's soon supplanted by electric guitar smolder which is itself then drowned by a ghostly swarm. “Timeless” provides a brief interlude before “Lights from The Middle of Nowhere (Part Two)” weighs in with its own incessantly mutating, twenty-minute installment which softly reintroduces the first part's theme during its final minutes.

June 2007