Giuseppe Ielasi & Riccardo Dillon Wanke are two avant-garde guitarists with a Morton Feldman-esque idea of minimalist composition. For the purposes of this recording, titled With Time, We Learned to Ask Less, Wanke plays the electric piano. Here they can be heard playing disconnected, delicate melodic fragments in a reverberant space, with a few seconds of silence between each, hinting at chord-like structures before dissolving them again into a soporific emptiness. You might call it a free jazz-informed instrumental ambient recording.

Having already been familiar with Ielasi through albums like 2022's The Prospect, I must admit that this album sounds so much like his solo work that I initially wouldn't have even known another musician was involved. The electric piano begins to distinguish itself from the guitar after a few minutes, with cleaner and smoother filtered Rhodes-like tones, but their playing styles are very similar.

I suppose this makes them a good match, but this is not an engaging recording to my ears. The sounds of the instruments are beautiful, but I feel both players are wallowing in directionlessness, the same feeling I have gotten while previously listening to Ielasi. I have never understood the sort of free improvisation that seems to reject the inclusion of even spontaneous structural elements, insisting upon a total lack of momentum in any direction or other, insisting that any idea that begins to emerge will not be developed, expanded upon, or referenced as time moves on. The pacing here is deeply sluggish, with pauses between each note, seeming to disrupt any relationship that could form between the notes. I begin to enjoy the subtle haunting qualities of a jazz chord Ielasi plays, only to find it contorts into an ugly dissonance within the next few seconds, and seems totally forgotten after that.

I can certainly enjoy a minimalist ambient recording, but if I think about what I enjoy most about many of my favourite minimal soundscape spaces, it is the sense of inhabiting a particular tonal space, chord, or emotion, which cannot be found here, as the tonalities simply wander, with no anchor. It is worthy of note that I have also never understood Morton Feldman, or other classical minimalists, similarly finding that lack of tonal grounding and prolonged silences between notes eliminated any sense of structure in the listening. It would be quite possible and desirable to combine these kinds of elements in a more memorable, varied or emotional manner, and deliberately slow passages like those that comprise this entire album would be more effective when contrasted by something distinctly else. To find out more