- If noise and dance music make for happy bedfellows, why not let musique concrète join in? That's the question raised by Rain Text, the duo of electroacoustic composer Giuseppe Ielasi and Giovanni Civitenga, the founder of the label and NTS Radio show SKYAPNEA. Civitenga has released with the likes of Brainfeeder as My Dry Wet Mess, so you'd think he'd be the one bringing the beats to this project, but there's really no parsing the roles here.
The compositional detail of 1 comes as no surprise. It's full of precisely arranged sonic minutiae. Sometimes it has the specificity of Foley effects (most musique concrète does). Take the imagistic clatters of "1.2": I'm not sure I've heard so many different kinds of percussion in one track before. But it requires flair to take what some might view as dry compositional practices and move fluidly between academic ideas and compelling, if still experimental, beats. As does tying that approach to the foggy after-hours hypnosis familiar to any experienced raver—"1.3" does this well. You might not hear any of 1's tracks in a club anytime soon, but it'd be a psychedelic twist if you did.
TracklistA1 1.1
A2 1.2
B1 1.3
B2 1.4