LP – Minus Habens

This latest release by Ivan Iusco was recorded in his Los Angeles studios. Synthagma features twelve tracks, three of which (“Head On Fire”, “Fly’s Heart” and “The Other Side”) are written in collaboration with Kid Moxie, a Greek musician who previously collaborated with Angelo Badalamenti and the David Lynch Foundation. The Italian composer, who also contributed to the soundtrack of the video game Cyberpunk 2077, is perfectly at ease in futuristic, metropolitan and dystopian settings, enriched here by a tribute to the videogame culture of the past and its icon, Pac-Man. Synthagma follows Transients (2015) and is Iusco’s third solo outing. Here he revisits some early musical inspirations: dark, industrial music and electro vintage, the result of an already synthetic childhood, which foreshadows future worlds and man-machine hybridizations. Iusco returns to the nineties, the decade that, in addition to the harshness of grunge, sees the birth of a new counterculture, that of cyberpunk and the post-human. Originally the artist intended to refer to the stylistic features and suggestions of those years, perhaps the first time that electronic music had a strong global impact outside of pop. In Synthagma, the visions of this era are recovered, a sensation that is particularly strong in the opening track, which skilfully blends the melodic interludes of
soprano Maria Bochmanova. There are many acoustic and orchestral passages exhibited in this project, as well as harsher references to techno, sci-fi riffs and a certain ambient-trance flavour. The composer always manages to juggle these, and even when the melodies become lighter, often in female songs, a wave of nostalgia and restlessness redirects attention to more abstract, poetic and reflective imaginaries. The future imagined by a recent past is not everyone’s cup of tea. Iusco works expertly on these layers of memories and manages to convey the pathos of that time without giving up on the present.

 

Ivan Iusco – Synthagma