Sergio Armaroli & Pietro Grossi — OSTN

Sergio Armaroli & Pietro Grossi's OSTN is described in the liner notes as a piece for "vibraphone and tape", a delirious midnight reverie of cold, aqueous resonances and bell-like tones from Sergio Armaroli's vibraphone. It is pleasantly reverberant, as if emerging from a sewer pipe. The tape effects are generally so subtle as to constitute a faint hiss in the background for most of the recording. Only in rare moments when the vibraphone is completely removed are any tape effects clearly audible, and they still seem to be comprised of faint static.

Initially, I find it to be an enjoyable texture, but it begins to feel undirected and meandering by the 3rd piece, an 18-minute track not dissimilar from the 15-minute opener. The vibraphone playing is only quasi melodic, sounding more like improvisatory noodling than anything planned, despite the (extremely lengthy) liner notes describing the vibraphone compositions as 'ostinati', implying the repetition of a short figure. There are indeed chord progressions, sketched in tremolo, but the only emotion I get from it is a vague eeriness. The repeating nature of the chord progressions means that nothing essentially progresses or changes throughout the runtime of each (long) track. In some ways it succeeds as a background ambient space, but it's hard to find anything engaging for active listening.

Only the last piece really differs from the sluggish unease, the sixth and final "Grossi OSTN#6". This one takes a free jazz angle to the instrumentation, with percolating dissonant taps from the vibraphone, and an actual audible performance from Pietro Grossi, sounding like wailing, aggressive harsh noise with heavy filtering, so it's not actually abrasive, but retains the sputtering lively movement. I wish there had been more of these types of sounds throughout the rest of the recording.

The simple loop-based music with imperfect tape fidelity is not unlike William Basinski, although this is significantly less degraded than Disintegration Loops. I find this generally to be an indecisive recording, not particularly melodically satisfying, nor any kind of ambient space one would wish to dwell in for long periods. The vague eerieness created here lacks the ritual focus of truly esoteric soundscape groups like Cyclobe or Nurse With Wound. The supposed tape elements are underused, providing only heavily muffled backdrops which are mixed very quietly.