Huge Tip! * Limited edition of 150 copies. Gatefold cover, printed on a special recycled citrus paper * Nearly as mysterious as the music that they release, since their launch in 2018, Les Giants has issued a slow and steady stream of incredible LPs, bridging the gap between historical and contemporary artefacts with ambitious gestures by artists like K. Leimer, Marco Bosco, Y Create, des édens, and Die Welttraumforscher. Working across a fairly expansive range of creative fields, the label’s output is bound by a palpable draw toward the visionary and the enigmatic; music that stands outside of the dominant streams, created by artists who feel little desire to limit themselves within normative definitions. Their latest, “Quasai” by the Italian sonic artist, independent researcher, and musician, Francesco Fonassi, perfectly fits this bill. Recorded at EMS Stockholm on a Buchla 200, before being mixed at IAC Malmö and Spettro studio, and mastered by Marta Salogni and Matt Bordin, it’s a brain-bending immersion into a singular world of pulsing, off-kilter structures of synthesiser tones and acoustic interventions. Issued by Les Giants in a beautiful vinyl edition of 150 copies - coming with a digital download of the album available on your Soundohm account, also featuring two bonus digital-only tracks - it’s yet another defining statement from a label and artist that have been each capturing our hearts and minds over recent years.

Active in the fields of sound based performance, transmission/transmedial art, and experimental music since the mid-2000s, the Italian sonic artist, independent researcher, and musician, Francesco Fonassi’s work explores the dynamics of listening and the mechanisms for auditory perception, investigating the limits and potential of each, and has - via actions, recordings, environmental configurations, radio transmissions, listening sessions, sculptural prototypes, installations and the creation of audiovisuals/sensory spaces - been presented in various venues, institutions, museums, and festivals across Europe, Asia and United States.

Increasingly prolific in recent years, issuing a number of releases within the duo Interlingua, with Francesco Venturi, and the noteworthy cassette with Marta Salogni, “L’Ebbrezza delle Grandi Profondità”, issued by Canti Magnetici in 2022, "Quasai” is Fonassi’s first LP of purely solo work to appear. Recorded at EMS Stockholm on a Buchla 200, belongs to the artist’s larger body of explorations into the dynamics of perception, positioning devices of separation and interaction to imply and a general feeling, and explore relationships of activity and passivity, and beyond which to trace out realms of co-belonging.

Within this light, it’s unsurprising that the pulsing tones and rhythms that unfold across the ten compositions that comprise "Quasai” are as tense and challenging as they are seductive. In a revealingly oblique poetics, Fonassi states of the album: “Quasai might be an underwater bird, nearly a chameleon, or a medusa. It iterates and evolves in a cubistic entanglement, casting songs of displacement, provoking hypnagogic magnetism and sonic pareidolia. Like a storm scene, which is made up by set of means used to give the illusion of rain, wind, thunder, and a raging sea. A nautical journey, precisely, where hypnotic rhythms float among waves of tapes, savory synthesizers and from afar the diaphonic echo of sibylline voices. And it is precisely now that we will pass through Petropolis.”

Largely rendered on a Buchla 200 with the occasional bubbling of processed vocals, “Quasai” is a deeply psychological exploration of the potential of synthesis to affect a state of being or mind, with many of its pieces shifting from early states of seductive, almost minimalist, sensibilities of rhythmical cycles that develop into passages of greater textural and tonal complexity, and shift between long moments of gathering tension and brief release.

Rigorously experimental - embodying an unmistakable razor sharp focus - Fonassi’s “Quasai” equally doubles with a great sense of humour and play, presenting something almost in the image of an off-kilter sci-fi tribalism. It’s nothing short of a fantastic debut by an artist that’s been catching our attention for a number of years, and yet another triumph in the endlessly ambitious and unpredictable catalog of Les Giants. Issued in a very limited edition of 150 copies on vinyl - mastered by Marta Salogni and Matt Bordin - this one is for the synth heads for sure. Highly recommended and not to be missed.