Pregnant Void return with another of their deeply involving and thought-provoking albums, this time from Berlin based sound designer and live-performer Francesco Devincenti.
Devincenti has been making music all of his life and quickly established himself back home in Northern Italy. To further his talents he head to Berlin to study at the S.A.E. Institute and soon went on to a job at Analogcut mastering studio. As such he is a sound design wizard with an exceptional ear for detail and someone who can get real meaning and soul of out the machines he often solders together himself. He is part of a couple of live hardware duos - MORK and TDV - and always fuses ambient, techno, distorted grooves, jungle beats and dub moods into his immersive recordings.
This new album draws on ten years of life experiences and uses music as a way of telling his own autobiographical story. “With the album I try to explain what I have inside in a way I cannot using only simple verbal communication: those moments of Brutal Reality where you lose something very important and cannot fully express yourself.” Though always obsessed with finding his own musical voice, Devincenti is also inspired by studio masters like King Tubby, Adrian Sherwood and Mark Ernestus. His experimental music follows no existing path and is made on modular systems that result in unpredictable and unconventional ambience and rhythms. A number of collaborations add more flavours to this most rich and rewarding album, including friend Hi.Mo, label boss Simone Gatto and vocalist Alice Lobo.
The album opens with the unsettling ambiance of ‘Math’ which has haunting synths and lots of little sonic details - glass, water, electricity - that make it all the more absorbing. ‘Fuck You Trip’, ‘Jim Odissey’ and ‘Chiaro Soldiers’ are the trio of tracks featuring Hi.Mo and they explore deep, swirling rhythms and soulful ambiance, beautiful electronic lullabies and frantic drum and percussive programming that suspends you in mid air.
The compelling mid-section features the cavernous and icy ’Skunk,’ with its plunging drums and cinematic design, foreboding ambiance of ‘Memories’ with sci-fi sounds and deep sonar pules, then the excellent ‘Lord of Lords’ is a dubbed out jungle track with a melancholic mood. The title track is a further exploration of jungle rhythms and swampy underwater atmospheres before minimal masterpiece ‘Euclidean’ has silky rhythms and harmonic bells soothing your mind. The lush ‘6 a.m. Fishing Dub’ with Simone Gatto resets the mood with a perfect swaggering dub cut that sinks you into a blissful reverie, and finally ‘Submission’ with Alice Lobo is another heartwarming and slow motion dub cut with spine tingling vocals and an autumnal mood.
Brutal Reality is filled with truly freeform electronic music - sounds without borders, but with very real narrative and an absorbing sense of emotion that makes it a moving listen in more ways than one.
