Cosmo, the working moniker of Marco Jacopo Bianchi, belongs to the fascinating, genre bending world that Ivreatronic has built around themselves. A pop singer by trade, whose last record, La Terza Estate dell'Amore, was issued by Columbia Records, Fermarsi is unlike anything the artist has created before or since. An adventure into experimental and ambient music, it illuminates what a skilled and versatile artist he is.

Fermarsi was conceived as a form of sonic therapy roughly a year before the outset of the global pandemic, and completed during the final days of 2020. In Marco Jacopo Bianchi’s own words, «It is a record that does not want to have edges, does not want to shout, does not want to go anywhere. It just wants to stay still and sway, observing the plants, the sea, the clouds. ..to remember. And maybe sleep.» This internal sensibility, standing in stark contrast to outward realms of popular music within which he usually traces under the same moniker, shimmers in calming beauty across the album’s two sides.

Taking up the entirety of the first side, drawing on a pallet of numerous synths and analog instruments, the 21-minute composition Intorno allo schermo draws into a fluid world that shifts and sways at a glacial pace, delicate harmonics, long tones, and punctuations dancing in washes that subsume the body and ear in pure aural bliss.

From here, the second side’s first two tracks, FDB and Canto di maggio, delve toward more explicitly tense and experimental territories, with dissonances, textures, and broken rhythms generated by acoustic instruments taking a more forward position, percolating alongside naturally occurring room sounds and actions, that occupy an entirely different spectrum of meditation before returning to an immersive blissed out harmonically drenched world with the album’s title track, recalling the heights the historic new age movement and early efforts in the ambient genre, concluding a career altering effort from Cosmo that sets our perceptions of his practice on its head.