O.A.S.I. - Il Cavaliere Azzurro

IRA - LP

Italy, 1986

Ambient / Experimental / Fourth World

Incredible soundtrack for the 1985 theatre piece Il Cavaliere Azzurro, one of the few records that contributed to the legend of Italian composer and multi-instrumentist Paolo Modugno. Beautiful fourth world rêveries and lush ambient tapestries made from the best materials. Highly recommended.

The end of the 2010's left on me the impression that the hordes of diggers that the success of labels like Music From Memory had sent to sea had somehow emptied record stores throughout the world of new age oddities and other 1980's electronic bizarreries, and by doing so, drained the feeling of excitement such naive and strange records used to provide me with. By 2019, records that have been precious sources of comfort throughout a decade saturated with bright 1980's tinged syrupy pop had lost their aura. Records, like Paolo Modugno's glimmering new age perfection Brise d'Automne had been so maniacally chewed on by tasteless retromaniac producers of the time, that the mystery they carried seemed to vanish forever.

It took me years and some recent chance meetings with such records to sense, not only the weird - artificial, naive and clunky - beauty that once attracted me, but also something that I never perceived before, an ingenuity in subsuming influences. The influences one can hear on Il Cavaliere Azzurro are broad, ranging from amazonian folk to south asian music, shamelessly channeled in pure fourth world fashion in utterly brilliant sceneries, richly decorated with a myriad of instruments, most of which are played by Modugno.

The vastness of Il Cavaliere Azzurro's sound spectrum and the ambition of the record surpass that of most of Jon Hassel's records from that period. Freed from the moral obligations of "serious" music - unlike Hassel - Modugno and Massimo Terracini recorded a soundtrack that is at time as freely evocative as it can possibly be ("Suono giallo" and its tape manipulations of sound from various sources - ethnomusicological records, field recordings), and at time drastically respecting the dramatical (and thus, rythmical) imperatives of the play, thus operating an artistic synthesis vaguely similar to that Kandinsky, painter of Il Cavaliere Azzurro, and early 20th Century avant-gardes would operate. Highly seductive and sensuous, the LP offers a soundscape of rare deepness. Incredible album. Very clean OG copy (VG+/VG+)