2024 stock The long awaited CD edition of our first vinyl release ever (2003), will finally give a wider audience the opportunity to listen to some of the most intense compositions of this visionary and uncompromising composer. Minimalist before the Minimalists, pioneer of Computer Music, founder of the Studio of Phonology of Florence, visual artist and hacker ahead of his time. This was Pietro Grossi, a larger-than-life Italian composer who questioned the concept of musical authorship and the idea of personal artistic expression: “A piece is not only a work (of art), but also one of the many “works” one can freely transform: everything is temporary, everything can change at any time”. “Ideas are not personal anymore, they are open to every solution, everybody could use them”.
This deluxe box compiles three of his electronic works from various points in his career, starting off with one of his earliest pieces, "Progretto 2-3" from 1961. The piece is extremely minimal and ambient, consisting of several different high monotones that follow one another, controlled by a computer algorithm. Far more interesting is 1969's "Collage" where Grossi puts to good use his concepts of music being an open process where no work of music is a finished piece but rather something to be manipulated into something else, perhaps reflecting Italy's loose copyright laws. "Collage" is just that, a dense collage of different sounds processed by the computer, with crashes and swooshes, clattering, pulses, and other noises in constant flux. Gritty and bruising, this primitive sample piece predates the industrial music aesthetic a couple years before Kluster's work, and is even harsher and noisier. Side two of the album is taken up by "Unicum" composed in 1985, another ambient drone piece, similar to "Progetto 2-3" and yet far more varied and rewarding, as the shifting tones create an alien topography of sound, with Grossi using far more advanced technology to create his automatic music. All in all, a nice way to sample a composer whose work is barely known.
