Artist: Andrea Marutti
Title: Sleepless Nights | Lysergic Mornings
Format: MiniCDr 3″, mini-digipack edition, ltd. 32 copies / MiniCDr 3″, regular edition / digital download
Label: Taâlem
Cat. number: almdig131 / alm131
Tracks: 2
Playing Time: 21:49
Release date: December 2019
File under: Ambient / Dark Ambient / Drone Music / Experimental
You can listen to the complete release and purchase it on the dedicated Bandcamp page.
Tracklist:
01. A Cypher For Glitchbusters (13:20)
02. Peter’s Psychedelic Breakfast (8:29)
Samples:
Credits:
Performed and recorded by Andrea Marutti in January 2019.
Mastered in May 2019.
Photography: Delphine Ancelle-B.
Digipack layout design by Daniel Crokaert based on an enlargement of details from an artwork entitled “Been Listening All Day” by Herber Pföstl.
Label’s press release:
We welcome back the italian artist Andrea Marutti (also known under the Amon or Never Known aliases, head of the sadly defunct Afe Records label too). Andrea was the very first artist to have a 3″ on taâlem, and that was exactly 18 years ago! Here he proposes a rather psychedelic yet dark and ambient journey in two parts.
Notes by Andrea Marutti:
“Sleepless Nights | Lysergic Mornings” is particularly important both for taâlem and me, because it comes exactly 18 years after my “Traces 94-95“, which on December 3, 2001, inaugurated the now incredibly long series of the label’s publications, and also because it represents my first proper release since I re-built my studio and started working on new music during the recent years.
“A Cypher For Glitchbusters” and “Peter’s Psychedelic Breakfast”, the two tracks featured on the EP in a seamless sequence, were created on purpose of a release on taâlem and were especially designed to fit the 3″ MiniCDr format.
In January 2019, as a sort of ‘personal experiment’ on myself, I worked on this music exclusively by night. For about one week I decided to sleep no more than a few hours each day during the late afternoon, and stayed awake all night to work with my synthesizers, sampler, effects and so on.
The resulting lack of rest put me in a particular state of mind, where I was less focused on the search of an ‘audiophile’ quality to the music, suggesting me to experiment with, and concentrate on, what would be usually considered ‘errors’. I intentionally included some glitches, tape hiss and various defects, and also used field recordings and other sounds which I originally recorded on cheap cassettes during the early ’90s, when I had an habit to slow down sounds with two tape decks and I usually re-recorded the same cassettes hundreds of times.
Both titles are inspired by this ‘experience’, and the tracks have a sort of ‘psychedelic quality’, or at least that is the impression they still give me months after their creation.
“A Cypher For Glitchbusters” is an attempt to describe with just a few words the practice I mentioned a few lines above, while “Peter’s Psychedelic Breakfast” is both an hommage to a quite more famous sonic breakfast – which I guess needs no further explanation – and a personal dedication to my closest friend who has been supporting and helping me ever since my memory can remember.
Reviews:
VItal Weekly 1214, Howard Stelzer, January 2020
I’ve enjoyed the Belgian label Taâlem (which grew out of a previous label called Harmonie) ever since their beginning in the late ’90s. They mainly put out 3” CDrs (a format that reminds me of trading cards) of darkly atmospheric music marked by electro-acoustic disturbance. This current batch is the label’s 129th, 130th and 131st release, which shows how prolific they’ve become. The 20-minute limit of the format suits this stuff perfectly. Concise statements that leave me wanting more, forcing me to return and listen more deeply. The first disc is by the Italian artist Andrea Marutti, who used to run a label called Afe Records and also records as Amon, Spiral, Never Known and Lips Vago. His latest 3” for Taâlem is, as the title implies, a hallucinogenic drone that throws in some weird wrenches as it gets closer to the end. Marutti works in the post-Lustmord “dark ambient” mode here, starting out with ominous blankets with low throb and slow-motion watery threat. After several minutes, the curtains lift and with cleansing light comes children talking and roughly-recorded scrape that seems like it jumped in from a different record. It’s a neat tonal shift, one that continues into Marutti’s second track, “Peter’s Psychedelic Breakfast”. That title is, of course, a nod towards Pink Floyd, though its unclear who Peter is or what the Floyd connection is. This track is another drone, though lighter in mood than the opener. The strangest part is the very end, in which the sound fades and dissipates, leaving a coda of digital glitches as if someone accidentally bumped the microphone or a cord went bad… and then abruptly hits an “off” switch. Weird. […]