Built around his new custom synthesizer, the latest project from the electronic musician and Nine Inch Nails member offers some of his liveliest music yet.
Alessandro Cortini, a rock guitarist turned synthesizer expert, is best known as a longtime member of alt-rock mainstays Nine Inch Nails. While this gig surely keeps him busy, he has also developed a reputation for collaborating with luminaries from the dimmer worlds of ambient, drone, and noise—artists such as Lawrence English, Daniel Avery, and Merzbow. These collaborations have helped inform the signature sound on Cortini’s solo albums, pitched somewhere between purgatory and the planetarium.
A lover of rare and vintage modular synths and drum machines, Cortini is well equipped to deploy all the glassy drones, upwelling noise, and electronic pulses he can imagine on releases such as last year’s Illusion of Time (with Avery) and 2019’s VOLUME MASSIMO. And just as his 2017 record Avanti focused on an early-1970s synthesizer made famous by Brian Eno, the palette of his latest album, SCURO CHIARO, centers on one specific instrument. The difference is this time Cortini created the instrument himself, and it catalyzes his lush, lean music into one of his liveliest albums yet.
As Pitchfork reported, the black hole at the heart of SCURO CHIARO’s dark galaxy is the Strega, a semi-modular synth and effects box scrawled with stylish but inscrutable runes. (“Strega” is Italian for “witch.”) Working with the boutique-synth builders at Make Noise, Cortini integrated his favorite features from various cult-legendary modular rigs into one small unit. In other words, he uploaded his musical consciousness into this machine and subjugated it to his will—and if science fiction tells us anything, it will soon rise up and destroy him. In the meantime, SCURO CHIARO succeeds in showing off the unit’s smoky yet lustrous range.
In addition to illustrating the vast potential of the Strega, the album is a showpiece for Cortini. The sound often resembles a tonier Ben Frost, and it has a striking internal consistency: a focus on the infinite fluctuations of limited palettes, a fine way of hanging harmonic flesh on sinewy rhythms, and an urge to slowly explode minute pulses into capacious sound worlds. Each track offers something new: The music of “ECCO” sounds like a huge, heavenly harmonium, while the papery, mechanical whoosh and wheeze of “CORRI” suggests a steampunk Xerox machine run amok. “CHIAROSCURO” spatters plaintive stars on a bassy dome, recalling the cosmic idylls of ’70s groups like Harmonia, before a radiant bolt of noise ignites its sense of peace.
Several highlights suggest the influence of classical composition as much as gearhead exploration. “SEMPRE” prestos an alien rave into an almost symphonic climax, while the music of Steve Reich looms over “NESSUNO,” as bass, percussive treble, and a flute-like whisper relay an inexorable momentum. With all these possibilities at his fingertips, Cortini can seem like a minotaur who built his own maze. Throughout SCURO CHIARO, he stalks his twisting signal paths with confidence and vitality, eager to turn each corner, each knob, and see where it might lead. Blending expertise and extemporization, his work consistently manages to thrill and surprise.
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