VACCINA, LINO CAPRA - Echi Armonici da Antico Adagio
Die Schachtel present unreleased material from Lino Capra Vaccina on Echi Armonici da Antico Adagio. For fans of the Italian avant-garde, few names inspire the loyalty and devotion offered to the percussionist and composer Lino Capra Vaccina, a perfect emblem of the countrys extraordinary movement of musical minimalism. He first gained note as a member of Aktuala, creating a hybrid of rock, avant-garde, and ancient musics while incorporating a diverse number of sonic traditions from across the globe: African, Middle Eastern, Indian, etc. Vaccinas career as a composer has been marked by two distinct features: an incredibly high bar of quality and ambition, and a tragically slim recorded output. Following his departure from Aktuala, he worked extensively with others -- Juri Camisasca, Franco Battiato, etc. -- and within the short-lived super group Telaio Magnetico, but his astounding solo efforts have been slow to emerge. In 1978, he released the legendary LP Antico Adagio (DS 027CD/027-1LP), and wouldnt be heard from again until 1992s equally extraordinary LAttesa. Fortunately, the Milan based imprint Die Schachtel has embarked on a multifaceted project of reissuing Vaccinas hard-to-find LPs for a new generation, as well as offering a range of stunning, unreleased archival recording. Echi Armonici da Antico Adagio falls into the latter category, but it is nothing short of a momentous event. Echi Armonici da Antico Adagio draws on the same body of recordings from which Vaccinas masterpiece Antico Adagio also grew, entering an already shimmering stage. The album is a revelation, a lost, towering artifact of the Italian avant-garde. It features two sidelong works of pulsing, hypnotic, ritualistic drone with Vaccinas percussion -- gongs, bells, and cymbals -- threaded by sustained tones, generated by the voices of Juri Camisasca and Dana Matus. Flirting with the outer-reaches charted by Buddhist and African music, it is a trance-inducing, meditative, cosmic world of sonic interplay. Sheets of resonance, stunning harmonic interplay, and intricate rhythms rise as one. Both performances -- immersive, beautiful, deeply moving, rewarding, and intellectually rigorous -- reveal themselves slowly at every return. Nearly forty years after its rhythms, tones, and ambiences imprinted themselves onto tape, Echi Armonici da Antico Adagio is unquestionably one of the most important albums to appear in 2017. Silver and gloss varnish print with printed inner sleeves housing a transparent anti-static record sleeve; Edition of 300. - Die Schachtel.