Nella Basilica is the singular result of a meeting between Robin Hayward andlegendary flautist Roberto Fabbricciani, whose work with Luigi Nono defined extended technique and instrument invention for late twentieth-century music. Working in the ancient church in Arezzo, Hayward and Fabbricciani improvise across five sections (“Nella Basilica,” “Adagio,” “Riflessione,” “Colori Di Cimabue,” and “Arezzo”), with the massive interior space a continual, living presence. Fabbricciani brings three bass flutes - including the hyperbass, a colossal twelve-meter instrument - to foreground the lowest registers of flute sound; Hayward’s microtonal tuba, equipped with an innovative valve system, matches and blurs the timbres.

Together, they create a bottom-heavy soundscape - sonorities hover at the edge of perception, sometimes nearly felt in the body rather than strictly heard. Pad noise, breath, and air tunnel effects offset slow, lingering tones; tabletops, instrument bodies, and percussion features animate the reverberant space. Color and harmonic blend arise from long, patient arcs rather than rapid articulation, each player responding with subtle energy to environmental echoes and evolving acoustics. The duo’s mastery lies in their capacity to savor timbral intersections and depth, each phrase folded into the collective resonance of the basilica.

Critics point out the album’s “awesome” quality - not for volume or velocity, but for immersion and the blurring of performer and environment. Nella Basilica is less a mere document than an expansive meditation on space, breath, and the materiality of low frequencies - chamber musicfor the threshold of audibility, where sound expands and recedes amid centuries-old stone andair.