Release Notes
Label: Mute
Released: October 4th, 2024
Mastered By: Marta Salogni
See Also: Interview with Alessandro Cortini
If You Like: Merzbow, Lawrence English, Ben Frost, and Tim Hecker
Italian electronic musician Alessandro Cortini showed up on these pages back in 2016 with his solo album, Risveglio. This is when, besides his appearance on Trent Reznor’s Nine Inch Nails albums and performances, I became fascinated with his particular aesthetic and sound design. In 2019, I covered his VOLUME MASSIMO album in-depth, about which I’ve also talked to him in this Interview with Alessandro Cortini. Two years later, his follow-up, SCURO CHIARO, also landed on my Best of the Year selections. Then, in early 2021, Cortini became an instrument builder. Pairing up with one of the most visionary modular synth manufacturers, Make Noise, he co-designed a widely acclaimed new semi-modular synth, Strega, celebrated by the community for its distinct unconventional textures, multi-layered grungy delay, filtered feedback, rich harmonic content and nearly dystopian soundscapes, which at times felt more like alchemy than sound design. Of course, I own this little synth and can go on talking about it for hours, but today, I’m covering Cortini’s latest album, which, yes, as you already may have guessed, is showcasing Strega across the five long-playing tracks.
Nati Infiniti originally began as an installation commissioned by Sónar Lisboa for their 2022 edition of this international festival. This immersive audio composition was presented across four floors (!) of the Museu de Lisboa’s Fábrica da Moagem. The experience evolved as the listener moved through each of the floors of the mill, emphasizing a sense of continuous motion and the interconnection between all elements. The composition developed as its interpretation was turned into a live audio-visual performance, which Cortini presented at Berlin’s Atonal Festival (and there is already a series of newly announced dates for 2025 – see ticket links here). Now, this 37-minute journey is available in an album form.
Making music on [a synthesizer] is like being an explorer in uncharted territory. Sometimes it’s less about the quality of the music you’re making, and more about finding out what the machine has to say to you that you haven’t heard before.
— Alessandro Cortini
This music is visceral, primordial, and profound. I can only imagine its sinister howling reverberating at high volumes across the Atonal venue. When I play it in my studio, I get distracted by the movement of my speaker cones, which slowly pulsate with the bass in the lowest frequency spectrum range. Its constant, slightly detuned wondering of tonalities and coarse textures evokes an unsettling feeling of being adrift – the very opposite of the pristine character of most electronic music today. “Balancing dark ambience with smoky, pulsing rhythms, his compositions are perfectly restrained, textured, and mesmeric.” Like a sorcerer, Cortini revives inanimate entities, and now they move, flowing like lava, unstoppable and ever-deadly. These sounds slither under my skin and my fingernails, infecting my bloodstream and neural synapses, and then they lay there dormant, but I’m still distressed.
The album is mixed and mastered by Grammy-nominated recording engineer Marta Salogni (who worked on records by Björk, Depeche Mode, and Lucrecia Dalt) and available on a limited edition black vinyl, packaged with a silver mirror board, as well as a striking gatefold compact disc, and, of course, a digital edition via Mute, released on October 4th, 2024. And if you’re a fan of Strega, you’ll be happy to know that there is another new module from Cortini and Make Noise called Bruxa, which lets you “spill your sound into time” and have it decay through the various filters.
