Release of September 23, 2022

Limited edition of 300 copies, comes as digipak.

Cristiano Bocci’s Beyond the Dark Zones does just what its title promises. It takes us beyond the heavy sounds of dark ambience—not only beyond them, but through them. Bocci’s poetics is rooted in the electronic soil of texture-based music; the plant that grows from it is a multi-faceted, many-branched thing.

First, the electronics. Bocci is a skilled creator of audio software; many of the programs he uses to generate and manipulate sound are his own custom designs. These are basic compositional tools for him; with them he composes floating drones and dirges, thickly woven textures of overlapped and interleaved timbres, stretched and compressed tones, basic motifs that are looped, granulated, and otherwise transfigured.

But for all their ability to expand on the possibilities of sound-as-sound, the electronics are ultimately in the service of the music. Many of the compositions on Beyond the Dark Zones seamlessly incorporate acoustic instruments, modal tonalities, and cyclical rhythms into surrounding electronic frameworks of varying abstraction. Bocci has a fine ear for creating ad hoc instrumental ensembles from disparate parts; brass, reeds, piano, and even the human voice all have a place here, along with Bocci’s signature 6-string electric bass. One of the most striking features of the album, in fact, is its unusual employment of trumpet or flugelhorn as the melodic voice in an electronic setting.
Certainly, the aesthetic core of the album is defined by the deep pitches and minor keys of dark ambience as well as by an associated sensibility, but this is a point of departure rather than a destination reached at the end of a cul-de-sac. Along the way, there are echoes of jazz and slowed-down jazz fusion, hints of field recordings, harmonies of a multi-tracked brass ensemble, down-tempo electronica, portentous prog rock, spoken word performance, and choral music.
Ultimately, in Beyond the Dark Zones, genre is an irrelevance; creative interfusion is of the essence.