Franco Falsini — Cold Nose

"Cold Nose" is a lush, serene ambeint work by Italian classic guitarist Franco Falsini, originally released in 1975, but never well known.  It was his only album, and now, in 2012, it finally gets re-released.  It is a single 3 part piece infused with many electronic elements, "ambient", from when the term "ambient" often meant a dense, challenging music, epic in scope, that went many unexpected places, as in the case of artists like Tangerine Dream, Klaus Schulze and Jean Michel Jarre.

Falsini creates a more natural, flowing and organic album than any of those other artists, who often specialized in alienating, cold and lonely atmospheres, and whose work often had dystopian, futurist and science fiction themes.  This music, to contrast, is saturated with love and hope.  It's quintessentially Italian, really: gushingly romantic.  Here, there are many of the soothing qualities later associated with new age music, but also a great deal more sincerity and originality.

This is a divinely ordered and transparent display of perfect precision and expression in harmony.  The voices of the electric guitar and synthesizer (the two principal instruments) sing together in a perfectly blended, glassy and tranparent sound, truly angelic.  It reminds me of the Ikue Mori album title "Painted Desert", and perhaps this name does better service  to Falsini than it did to Ikue's album.

Falsini's guitar playing is achingly beautiful.  When he plays leads his tone warbles and quaver's like a singer's voice; always his picking is liquid and effortless.  it's as if he playing all around you in part 1, as there are 5+ layers of his playing, meticulously arranged and panned in the soundspace.  This track has a mysterious haunting feel, a slow burning and sultry start to the album.

Much like later electronic musicians, Falsini spends much of his time with ostinatos, arpeggi, loops, short fragments of melody, continuing infinitely, mesmerizing, layering with others to form different implied harmonies.  But Falsini's work is all the better for being classically informed.  He knows the meaning of terms like 'modulation', 'counterpoint', and 'expanded tonality', and has the power to write climactic chord progressions of epic, heart wrenching beauty similar to the Tangerine Dream film scores, best exemplified by the latter half of part 3, which brings tears to my eyes.  The extended droning passages never remain inert for too long, instead, surprisingly and suddenly emerge into soaring melodic vistas, a striking contrast to the predictable monotony of a lot of today's ambient music.

It's hard not to feel nostalgic hearing this.  It truly is difficult to find a single piece as jam packed with gravitas in this day and age, and only the greatest artists have ever managed it in such concise form.  "Cold nose" joined my all time favorite albums after a single listen.  You must experience this emotional odyssey of Falsini!