CD, Nextera, 2008
www.aferecords.com/andreamarutti
All the music on “The Subliminal Relation Between Planets” was performed and recorded live by Andrea Marutti in Italian countryside of Archiaro near Catanzaro on August 24th 2007. Based on visual and verbal suggestions from fellow artist Tommaso Cosco, the album comprises of four lengthy dark ambient soundscapes.
Marutti, based in Milan, Italy, has been recording electronic music since the early 1990s and is also the founder of the AFE Records label. He releases music under the names Afeman, Amon, DJ Lips, Lips Vago, Lips Vago Quartet, Never Known and Spiral, each pseudonym covering a different style of electronic music. With a long list of collaborators and releases on many labels to his name, Marutti is also part of the bands Hall Of Mirrors and Sil Muir. Recording under his own name since 2001, his music focuses on the dark ambient and experimental side of electronic music.
Musically, “The Subliminal Relation Between Planets” is a dark but serene journey on waves of low droning sound with cascading chimes, vaguely coherent voices and other miniscule sounds carefully assembled to form a hypnotic sonic bedrock. Often resembling a deep dark ocean bed with an ever present bassy drone, each track holds a certain sub-aquatic charm of tiny chinks of sound, both melodic but strangely distant and unseen. As the low rumble continues to gently roll on, synth tones criss-cross, slithers of sound fall all around and half-heard voices are caught in the tranquil haze of mesmerizing sound. Something about Marutti’s music is both serenely relaxing and subtly unnerving at the same time, almost as though the calming aspects are masking the true meaning of the dark undertones it hides. Under those shards of sonic beauty lie dark unseen forces, almost like an unknown danger lurking deep in the watery depths of the ocean the sounds resemble. All the way through the mood very slowly heightens until the 24 minute closing track “In the Fish Trove” unleashes its darkest passage yet with anxious tension building all around, almost as though some impending danger is nearby, tones echoing like disembodied screams before dissipating with a steady rise to the surface, leaving the fear of the darkness to rise again another day.
Ultimately, “The Subliminal Relation Between Planets” is a beautiful dark ambient soundscape that must have been fascinating to experience first hand during the recording process.
[8/10]
— Paul Lloyd