Alio Die & Lorenzo Montanà: The Threshold of Beauty (CD)

From Textura The second collaborative effort by Alio Die and Lorenzo Montanà on Projekt adheres more closely to ambient-electronic soundscaping convention. Arriving four years after Holographic Codex, The Threshold of Beauty blends Alio Die’s zither, sitar, psaltery, and field recordings with Montanà’s piano and electronics on six meditative ambient settings. The recording project began with the latter augmenting Die’s psaltery string plucks with real-time electronic treatments and processing, after which Die applied editing to the results and completed the process with additional effects and loops. Timbre and sonority are critical to the music’s effect, with the exotic shimmer of the psaltery lending the material a mystical quality that points it in a New Age direction; further to that, bell tinklings and enveloping synthetic textures deepen its meditative character, while wordless vocalizations by Die bring out a choral dimension. By titling one piece “Dark Dhrupad” and thereby alluding to the ancient tradition of Hindustani classical music, the collaborators also acknowledge the influence of Indian culture on this East-meets-West project. Said details suggest music of determinedly peaceful character that’s tailor-made for contemplation, yet while that’s true, moments of turbulence also surface during the recording’s hour-long presentation. An overall sense of calm is more pervasive, however, which makes The Threshold of Beauty a non-chemical means by which to achieve if not nirvana then at least serenity. Representative of the recording are “The Closest Place to the Soul,” which, with the pluck and strum of Die’s string instruments draped across its droning foundation, thrums like some primordial entity, and the oceanic meditation “On the Waves of Fate – Part 2,” a seventeen-minute bookend to its shorter counterpart. The album’s largely homogeneous in tone, but the two do spring a surprise or two on the listener, the inclusion of what sounds like saxophone on “Vacant Lights Disclose the Shadows” a memorable illustration. The press release pitches the recording as “a transcendental vision of beauty as an integral part of the cosmos,” but don’t let that grandiose claim put you off. The Threshold of Beauty is a thoroughly accessible exercise in ambient soundscaping design that can be experienced on purely sonic grounds or with however much cosmological meaning you care to affix to it. -Ron Schepper