Sound artist Vitiello's work, rich in concept, marked by process, tends to get overshadowed by lesser experimentalists worth half his salt. Masterminding broad-based drone and environmental creations years before they became virtually de rigueur amongst fringe artists and their music, Vitiello's methodologies at least yield tangible results. Neither too academic nor pretentious, he's crafted some remarkable sounds sourced from a number of unlikely situations. Early albums such as The Light Of Falling Cars and Chairs Not Stairs utilized conventional synthesizers and samplers (not to mention guitars) to achieve their ends: though beautifully realized, and reasonably unique, mostly recorded for films and installations, they nevertheless represented Vitiello's muse-in-progress. More significantly, he recorded sounds on a floor near the top of one of the World Trade Center towers in 2001 that not only capture the building's own innate character but remain vivid aural memories rendered more poignant by what would transpire later that year.
Collaborating (in a manner of speaking) with the chamber music collective known as Eighth Blackbird, Vitiello applies his trusty mixer and processors to fragments of sounds provided by the sextet, to which are added his indomitable soupçon of field recordings, the sum total further combined, dissected and reintegrated into the sonic matrix. Vitiello's genius lies in making qualitative decisions as to what should and shouldn't be messed with; granted, he generally tweaks the sounds in some kind of fashion, but when left somewhat "au natural," subtly altered, does the fundamental pleasures of his constructs bear fruit. On "Post 3P," flutes are evident but their decay is smeared across a stereo field of drones like a hastily daubed-on glob of jelly; glittering reverberations of percussion and strangely fluttering, gasping sounds blur the picture further, suggesting what might arise should AMM zap the prams of your average contemporary lap-topper. "One Violin" appears on face obvious enough, but Vitiello becomes restless, letting the strings surge and congeal with a baroque gait, except for a yawning curtain of glitchy aftereffects that transform the proceeding stateliness into something quite otherworldly.
It's hard to say if this latest recording represents Vitiello at the top of his game; there's enough mutational imperatives going on here that should satisfy those curious enough about how you might redesign "chamber music" for the existent century. The closing "Rush & Lullaby (2)" is a case-in-point: again, one easily recognizes a plucked string here, a mournful chord there, a stalled bleat and errant squeak, but Vitiello skillfully weaves the puzzle pieces together so well it practically augurs in a post-post-modern classical (21st century?) ideal, moistening the often parched realms of that venerable genre; not a bad thing by any means.
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