Il sogno di un piano veneziano a Parigi (2005)

With Il Sogno di un Piano Veneziano a Parigi Alio Die and Festina Lente creates together a place of the memory where the past rest with a filmy nostalgia.. it is a dramatically joint that finally extinguish itself to the become.. there at the border where the personal moment ends, and the taste of an impersonal experience starts, with a longer breath. Like life belongs to the cosmos, and time belongs to the seasons.
After a long friendship a pianoforte met a zither, their incorporating sounds brought on wings of an ancient and lully dream, in foggy layers of impalpable feelings and in a wayward journey towards the inland. The field recordings were collected in Paris, East-Asia, and America by Alio Die, kimsonJa and Francesco Paladino such as rituals, animals, objects and spontaneous voices in the street... surround and conduce towards parallel worlds.
The ambient tracks are alternated with more intense and obscure moments, without breaking the solution of the continuum, through the organic elaborations of the sound's dye... loops of notes and silences, subtle presences of the field recordings that spy both: mankind and nature… So the treated piano and the nipped and scrubbed cords, the voices and noises, the resonances of metals... calls back the memory's body,  that comes to the surface with great glangour. Dissolvent bright and dark colours, putting voices together to a poetical inspiration  and a glamorous and precise lyricism of the entire inside.

Label press

It is a very deep and conceptual work, full of esoteric mysteriousness, philosophic sense and acoustic aesthetics. Excellent mastering! New sounding is harmoniously combined with classical passages from Alio Die. Beautiful improvisations with piano and zither mixed with a lot of different sounds and soundscapes. It is not simply music, it is like a film, but it is more than a film, much more! It is a flight of fantasy, an unrestrained flight! Most of all it is similar to lucid dream: Visionary landscapes of different cities are changed by pictures from own memory. Events are transforming from one to another but not breaking a mysterious logic of dream.
This immersing inside of itself, wonderful travel to depths of the entity.
And all this gives you a great pleasure and delightful rest to your mind!

 Andrey Faryus / www.faria.ru

Yet another fine duet initiated by one of the most prolific and adventurous composers of ambient music. On 25 January 2003, Alio Die (Stefano Musso) and Festina Lente (which apporpirately means "hurry slowly" in Latin and is in fact one Michele Brieda) spent a single session improvising, with the latter playing pianos and the former zither as well as adding sundry electronic effects and field recordings. At thirty-five minutes and executed with such effortless grandeur, the opening track "Nei meandri piu remoti del sogno di Scarabeo" could just as well have been released on its own. Happily, it was not, as what comes after perfectly complements and reexamines what came before. (What´s more, Alio Die is always generous with releases on his Hic Sunt Leones label, offering very long playing times - in fact this record is just a few seconds short of the maximum running time for a conventional CD.) Said track is highly cinematic in nature, a small masterpiece of taste and restraint. I myself picture Brieda seated at the pianoforte near an open window, dabbling distractedly, interested more in exploring acoustic timbres than creating music per se, as the hustle and bustle of the urban world hustles and bustles its way by - literally the world, as this album features field recordings from Malaysia, Hong Kong, Katmandu, California and beyond. This luscious track calls to mind a chamber version of  Tetsu Inoue´s classic crossing of ambient electronica and urban field recordings, "World Receiver". Two or three of the remaining tracks engage in suggestive experiments in how to nudge ambient into the realm of a kind of amorphous improv, while the five-minute long fifth track and lovely twelve-minute closing track seem to reprise the first track both in mood and execution, thus bringing the listener full circle.
A long time since two musicians collaborating for the first time complemented one another so well.

Stephen Fruitman / Sonomu.net