Fabio Orsi — Wo Ist Behle?

Fabio Orsi started releasing music in 2005 from his home in Taranto on the southern coast of Italy and is probably best known for his 2006 collaboration with fellow Italian outsider musicians My Cat Is An Alien (titled ‘For Alan Lomax’) that revealed Orsi’s inspiration for field recording. More recently, though, he moved to Berlin, where this, his latest album, was self-produced without any explicit field recordings in the mix, instead featuring a minimal set up of guitar, synth and effects to deliver a series of five sequentially numbered ‘Loipe’ or loops.

So, throughout ‘Wo Ist Behle?’ it’s tempting to read a strong Berlin influence in the electronic modulations. Each track builds slowly from muted origins into circling pulsations as Orsi’s layers of analogue synth gradually shed their filters until they are proudly stirring the air like the kosmische excursions of an early Tangerine Dream. This regular, cyclic effect is often emphasised through the metronomic rhythms of a single bass note or machinic patterns of a bleeping synth emerging and submerging from the psychedelic drones to bring hints of Tresor techno to the Teutonic trip.

As if to confound such observations, Orsi deviates a little from the recipe on the final track by replacing the spacey synths with clouds of drone guitar. They arrive like a soaring aircraft only to evolve into a cyclone of a feedback and distortion that is barely contained by a surprising bit of rock drumming creating a so-called shoegazing feel that returns us to earth from an otherwise ethereal journey.

As a whole, the recordings are rich and well balanced allowing subtleties to be discovered and admired and yet the album also demonstrates how Orsi’s sound pools really require an excess of ten minutes to become psychoactively affecting. The briefer tracks, particularly ‘Loipe 2’ which is by far the shortest, can feel somewhat anecdotal and unfinished as the gradual approach of rhythmic waves fades inconsequentially soon after they’ve arrived. In contrast, ‘Loipe 3’ and the album’s opener (you’ve guessed it, ‘Loipe 1’) have time to become lush, immersive environments that allow their listeners to swim through their heady layers without their illusions dissolving before being fully explored.