Dark Companion
RAMAGLIA, VINCENZO - Atomic City
"Vincenzo Ramaglia is a Roman composer active in contemporary music experimentation and in what he calls PEM ("popular experimental music"). After the academic training -- at the end of which he won the TIM (Tournoi International de Musique) with an orchestral work -- his music research insinuates itself into the alchemy between score and improvisation, between electronics, acoustic instruments (often investigated in their extended techniques) and voice. Atomic City is the fourth album by Vincenzo Ramaglia, landing of a long research path that begins more than ten years earlier and it is marked by the three recording projects before this unexpected electronic turn. In 2007, Michele Coralli of Blow Up defined his first CD, Formaldeide as a "place of impossible meeting between Coleman Hawkins and Salvatore Sciarrino." Regarding the second CD, Chimera (2008), Max Marchini of Rockerilla called the album "an admirable interface at the zenith of the starry sky of intelligent and improvised jazz and new contemporary music." PVC Smoking (2011), his third CD, is an IDM score with improvisations, combining electronics and acoustic instruments. After seven years of reflection, silence, construction, and deepening of an electronic setup without a computer, Atomic City is a surprise, an album finally naked, devoid of any score, but with an intricate maze of analog sequences, composed on the machines as on a pentagram, almost in a thoughtful orchestral counterpoint, and manipulated in real time by the author, to which Renato Ciunfrini reacts to with clarinet improvisations. In a sense, Atomic City is the promised land of all the peregrinations and breaks that precede it. The synthesis - unexpectedly coherent and explosive in his unprecedented language - of a vast collection of seemingly contradictory urgencies. And it is, in fact, popular experimental music." - Dark Companion.
