Deison, Matteo Uggeri

condition (record/cover): M / EX- (bumped edge near pocket) 

Five Italian imprints joined forces to co-release this 2015 collaboration between Cristiano Deison, the Friulian abstract-composition pioneer active since the Nineties, and Matteo Uggeri, the Milanese composer-designer also of Sparkle In Grey. In The Other House is a concept album that became one in the making: Deison and Uggeri recorded across the winter of 2012-2013 without ever meeting physically, and as the work accumulated it revealed itself as an auditory portrait of an imaginary house and the presences within it.

Six rooms. "Fessure (Attic and Stairs)," "So Detached (Dining Room and Terrace)," "Micro Drama (Kitchen)," "Stasis (Bathroom)," "Worried Stagnation (Bedroom)," and "Prelude, Largo (Stairs and Cellar)." The music builds from field recordings, bowed metals, sampled violin, piano, guitar, trombone, saw, and electronic drone, with photographic accompaniment by Francesca Mele that serves as both seal and generative source for the album.

The dark-ambient genre tag fits poorly. What Deison and Uggeri have built is closer to the acoustic-doom method that Erik Skodvin's Svarte Greiner developed in Norway, rich in organic surface detail, held together by a steadily ebbing electronic bed. Every room carries its own anxiety; the house as a whole resolves nothing. A gatefold LP in a 15 by 15 cm sleeve, co-produced across the most active imprints of the Italian post-industrial research network.