Gigi Masin - Calypso Music Album Reviews

Inspired by the tranquility of the Greek island of Gavdos, the Italian ambient musician luxuriates in leisurely synth passages and gentle piano melodies.

The Italian composer Gigi Masin’s music has long mirrored his fascination with the natural world. His 1986 debut, a collection of gentle, flowing pieces for piano and synthesizer, was simply called Wind. Many of his subsequent titles have referenced waves, clouds, and insects. In 2014, Music From Memory pulled together an archival collection of his music, with a title that underscored his music’s dialogue with the world around him: Talk to the Sea. His songs are largely wordless, but they nevertheless echo these sorts of images. The melodies are simple and slow-moving, but in a powerful, unpredictable way. There’s a placid joy in tracing the movements of songs like “Clouds,” watching textures and rhythms coalesce and dissolve like ripples on a lake.

On his new album Calypso, Masin made his music’s connection to nature even more explicit. In a documentary about its creation, he explains that he retreated from his home in Venice to Gavdos, an island south of Crete that he’d wanted to visit for decades. The small isle has a mythical significance—legend has it that it’s the same island on which Odysseus was imprisoned by Calypso—but Masin was struck by its simple beauty. Being surrounded by sun, sea, and salty air was a way of escaping from the mundanities of life back home. It’s the kind of place, he says, “that regenerates, enlightens, [and] opens your mind.”

Calypso echoes the emotional experience of Masin’s respite. At nearly 90 minutes long, it’s a leisurely paced album with a lot of repetition. Each piece is full of slowly sighing synth passages and languorous piano melodies that mimic the strange way time dilates when you remove yourself from the rhythms of the city, the way an afternoon alone at the beach can feel like a beautiful eternity.

Masin has said that he’s accepted that his music is a sort of “non-idea.” He approaches the process of making music as intuitive and egoless; he’s more inclined to follow sounds where they lead him rather than dictate where he wants them to go. “This gives me the freedom to not have to make too [many] decisions,” he says. You can sense that approach in the wonderful biodiversity of Calypso. His music has always been varied, especially in the time since he’s returned to more active music-making, after spending most of the ’90s working an office job. Calypso is ambient in a broad sense, but it covers a lot of different moods and sounds.

The album opens with a delicate flurry of strings and synthesizers, but it quickly moves into a sleepwalking rhythm that feels like equal parts Portishead and L.A. beat scene on “Bellamore”; the trumpet-draped ambiance of “Nefertiti” recalls Jon Hassell’s mystic experiments. Each of these first three tracks could be worth exploring for an entire record, but Masin moves quickly through each successive style. It continues like this over the course of the record, no song too similar to the last. And yet, because it’s designed to echo the feeling of the island that inspired it, each piece still nevertheless takes place in this beautiful shared universe of sunny synthesizers and delicately purring electronics. If the through line connecting these tracks sometimes becomes hard to follow, that’s probably part of the point. There is a certain pleasure in getting lost in paradise.


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Gigi Masin - Calypso Music Album Reviews Gigi Masin - Calypso Music Album Reviews Reviewed by Wanni Arachchige Udara Madusanka Perera on April 07, 2020 Rating: 5

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