Claudio Parodi--Horizontal Mover

One track. One hour. One hell of a story. One crappy piece of music.

This is Horizontal Mover, the first track of a seven part series from Italian pianist and electronic avant-garde musician Claudio Parodi. Each feature will use one of seven tracks of Tiziano Milani’s Suoni 2005 as a starting point—and is dedicated to the work of Alvin Lucier. The use of reonsators and humming amplifiers was styled after Lucier, directly mimicking his work "I am sitting in a room," which involved playing that speech line until the loss of speech. After much cutting, stretching, distorting (what Parodi describes as "uncovering a new detail in Milani’s accumulative work"), the song was so incredibly long that Parodi’s computers failed and he had to revert to "pioneers’ age of electro-acoustic music." Just what was he recording? A room. The reverberations of a room.

Naturally, the story behind this odd piece of art is more interesting than the art itself. I spent an hour of my life listening to the chopped up and faded reverberations of an empty room, and I want that back Parodi. For those who appreciate avant-garde art, you need no review to hype this record, and forgive me for saying this is boring tripe. Yes, I may have missed the deeper artistic message behind it all, but I have my own rooms to listen to for an hour. For those who like music, stay clear.

(Published at MusicEmissions.com)