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The problem of Electronic Music has been left unsolved by the mainstream, and so - since it was never commercialized or domesticated - Electronic Music has followed its own path. Taking risks less adventurous others would not, Tony Masiello makes music so as to experience the shear pleasure of creation. His release Euphonic Interference (71'50") favors the topical over the universal, with the main point of this invention being the method by which it was made. Fans of modular synthesizers and the skillful coaxing of these music systems will find much to savor throughout this album. Euphonic Interference is not a song you listen to, but rather a network you enter. Sounds invade the listener's space in a line of continuing well ordered events. Masiello's deliberate pacing establishes this work as more of a cold intellectual puzzle than a poem made of sound. Pulling us along with him on the studio performance odyssey, he wanders, looking for routes. This music is not about epiphanies; it is about discovery and potential. In a full examination of minute changes in timbre over time, we humans may hear the soul of a machine - in the care of a promising artist. Well into this long form piece of process it dissolves into environment - as an electrical formation of freestanding reality. At every moment popular music is explaining itself, while most of EM exists for the purpose of pure discovery. Is Masiello creating music? or just minding/overseeing an array of equipment? Euphonic Interference will never explain itself, unless the listener has the intellect of a technician, and the mental apparatus to interpret what is being heard. The rest of us will feel its volumes, vectors and densities - and austere lucidity.
- Chuck van Zyl/STAR'S END 23 August 2018 |
