Alberto Boccardi — Apnea

[Room40 — 2024]★★★★★

Reviewed 23 August 2024by Colin Lang

Within the wide and increasingly difficult to pigeonhole genre of experimental electronic music, finding a point of entry can be exhausting, if not downright futile. I am the first to admit that my Venn diagram feels more like an Etch A Sketch than any kind of stable map, which does actually have its advantages. Enter Alberto Boccardi, whose latest release, the archly named Apnea, is a claustrophobic masterpiece of microtonal movement with a bevvy of frustrated stops and starts. Composed over several years in his native Sicily, the air and light of the island have been completely walled off in favour of what feels like a tiny room somewhere in a basement, where ideas move without ever finding a proper home.

The individual sounds on Apnea are wet and squishy, nothing overly abrasive or hard, and the pulsating pops and blips that bounce through "Sessantacinque" feel like needy children vying for attention at the breakfast table (Boccardi's son appears as Apnea's cover image). Over the course of the nine tracks that make up this release, concepts begin to emerge and are almost immediately diverted, hunted back to the musical sketches from whence they emerged. The layering of each sonic texture is so specific, deliberate, even, that the collagist nature of their combination never tips into the overly intentional or thought out. Boccardi's familiarity with the endless drifting from individual sound source to the bigger gestalt is singular and at times breathtaking. Like a good Pointillist painter, he is able to carefully manipulate the facture of each brushstroke with the final image in mind. Except here, there is no finality – music is craftier than the painted work in this regard – and so the inability to finish becomes a structural logic that courses through each mode of the spiralling Apnea complex.

Fans of minimalist electronica, ambient experimentalism and whatnot, will appreciate the craft that went into composting a work that cannot sustain its own distracted state of affairs. One of the best albums of the year so far!. To hear it for yourself

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