Luca Formenti — Tacet

Tacet is the type of album that avoids consideration as any type of genre exercise. Guitarist and "micronoise" technician Luca Formenti claims to be interested in the silence within music, which Tacet includes in its fair share. But it's not austere or mired in the concept. There's certainly enough sound here, so perhaps Formenti is referring to the use of silence within musical pieces. There is a great deal of stasis about much of the album, but listen carefully, because there is much more going on than you might initially realise.

The album starts off with a mellow drone, which has a semi-orchestral feel thanks to the inclusion of Deborah Walker's cello. The next piece is Layer (first), which, like the last track Layer (Resonance), is indeed a dense layer cake of tones created solely on guitar. These pieces appear as a framing device for the rest of the music in between, a common, cohesive reference point. The rest of the album has several varying elements, the common factor being that they are all applied with restraint. The guitar tracks remind of the ambience and natural flow of Fripp and Eno. Formenti's methodology is hard to pin down; it sounds like he uses an ebow, or it could be that he simply moves the volume knob up and down on his guitar to create a violin like sound. He creates drone like sounds at times, but he rarely settles on single tones.

The inclusion of microsounds calls for close listening. The fact that these sounds are part of the fabric of foreground sounds requires that you bug the neighbors a bit, unless you use headphones, since you have to crank it up to hear the details. The album also includes a bit of a jazzy undertow, as Marcus Stockhausen lends his less than standard trumpet sounds to a couple of tracks. There are also a couple of tracks which include percussion. Steve Jansen, known for being a member of Japan, as well as his recent solo work, appears on electronic drums, and Frank Moreno adds acoustic drums. The achievement here is that Formenti has put these seemingly disparate elements together artfully, creating an episodic, fully mature work.