*200 copies limited edition* Since its founding in Milan during the early years of the new millennium, Die Schachtel has occupied a singular place in the landscape of experimental music, issuing a carefully curated body of reissues and archival releases by historically significant figures and projects like Christina Kubisch, Luciano Cilio, Marino Zuccheri, Prima Materia, Claudio Rocchi, Lino 'Capra' Vaccina, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza, Roland Kayn, and numerous others, balanced against bristling contemporary counterparts by the likes of Jim O'Rourke, Giovanni Di Domenico, Nicola Ratti, Luigi Archetti, Valerio Tricoli, etc. In 2019, Die Schachtel launched a new series, Decay Music, an initiative nodding to Michael Nyman’s seminal debut and its place within Brian Eno’s development and creation of early ambient music. Across its first eight releases, the series has set out to highlight inspired contemporary experimental efforts of the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract, delivering remarkable sounds by Vértice, Stefano Pilia, Sandro Mussida, Giovanni Di Domenico, Claudio Rocchetti, Paolo Spaccamonti, and Luca Scarabelli and Michele Lombardelli’s Untitled Noise. Now Decay Music returns with its ninth and tenth - and final - instalments: Luigi Turra and Elio Martusciello’s “Liminale” and Sergio Armaroli and David Toop’s “And I Entered Into Sleep”. Each striking electroacoustic explorations of space, time, and the complexity of meaning bound to sonority — Turra and Martusciello’s interweaving washes of microscopic textures, fleeting vocalizations, and minimal instrumental interventions to sculpt abstractions at the juncture of transitory space and memory, and Armaroli and Toop’s nodding toward Marcel Proust, constructing intricate landscapes of pointillistic detail and suspended temporality from pulsing vibraphone tones and a vast palette of electronic sound sources and processes — that radically rethink the terms of what ambient music can be perceived to be. Further positioning Decay Music as the post-modern, 21st Century mirror to Obscure Records, “Liminale” and “And I Entered Into Sleep” are issued by Die Schachtel in two highly limited, deluxe 180g vinyl editions, housed in silkscreened cover and outer sleeve, designed by Bruno Stucchi.

An aural bridge between two distinct generations of Italian experimental musicians, “Liminale” is the debut collaborative outing from the creative partnership of Luigi Turra and Elio Martusciello. Active within the context for roughly two decades, Turra (b. 1975) is a reductionist/electroacoustic composer, noted from his tense deployment of concrete and acoustic sources — particularly small sounds and noises — whose work threads the balance between silence, tactile auditory perception, and aleatoric music. Martusciello (b. 1959), on the other hand, is a musician and composer working across the fields of acousmatic and electroacoustic composition, sound installation, multi-media and audiovisual art, and computer music improvisation, who is widely celebrated for both his solo efforts and his collaborations with Eugene Chadbourne, Mike Cooper, Alvin Curran, Chris Cutler, Rhodri Davies, Iancu Dumitrescu, Michel Godard, Tim Hodgkinson, Lawrence D. "Butch" Morris, Jérôme Noetinger, Tony Oxley, Evan Parker, Z'EV, and others.

A single, nearly 40 minute work, extending across the two sides of the LP, “Liminale” — as its title eludes — is an exploration of the liminal through sonic means: “places that exist on the threshold, transitional spaces suspended between a before and an after, between the real and the evanescent” conceiving the soundscape as “a liminal place, a space to be inhabited without the certainty of where it leads.” Unfurling like a labyrinth navigated in darkness, the piece’s first half is marked by sparseness and restraint, as slow-paced guitar tones and harmonics thread silences and resonant ambience within a sprawling sense of space, delicately populated by tiny sounds, fleeting punctuations drawn from undeterminable sources, vocal utterances, and the unexpected appearance of intoxicating piano tones.

As “Liminale” progresses into its second half, Turra and Martusciello enter a more densely populated notion of the in between. No less defined by the presence of space and mystery, discreet textures rustle and writhe within passages of pure concrete abstraction and a fragmented, stretched sense of musicality: long-tones, metallic pulses, minimal vibrations, processed vocalizations, guitar harmonics, and deconstructed piano melodies, buried in spectral, gauzy hazes drifting from beyond arm’s reach within an imagistic and immersive landscape of profoundly meditative scope, where each sonic element flirts the line between emergence and disappearance.

Intimate, fragile, and achingly beautiful, “Liminale”, Luigi Turra and Elio Martusciello’s debut collaboration, is a masterstroke in sound-craft and composition, revealing the potency of meaning locked within transitional spaces and the undefined, and imbuing silence with monumental gravity and weight. Mastered for vinyl by Giuseppe Ielasi, and taking electroacoustic minimalism to an etherial extreme, “Liminale” is issued as the ninth entry in Die Schachtel’s Decay Music series — highlighting inspired contemporary experimental efforts of the ambient, ethereal, and emotively abstract — in a highly limited, deluxe 180g vinyl edition, housed in a silkscreened cover and outer sleeve, designed by Bruno Stucchi.