Recorded at Naples’ historic Auditorium Novecento, Notes from the Air is the second full‑length from Ciro Vitiello, and it orbits a single, unstable image: the seagull. That coastal apparition – ridiculous and divine, awkward on land yet untouchable in flight – becomes the album’s secret mascot, a figure that carries both wonder and threat in its gaze. Vitiello writes into that tension: the desire to fly and the fear of falling, the suspicion that the crash has already happened somewhere offstage, and everything we hear is the drift afterwards. Wind, creaking ropes, invisible currents: across the record these aren’t just atmospheres but messages from a different decoding state, hints that air can be both home and haunting.
Musically, Notes from the Air moves in a slow, sidelong way between orchestral gestures and dream‑pop/post‑rock shadows. Vitiello’s fascination with shoegaze textures and cinematic pacing guides the whole, so that even the brightest passages feel slightly fogged, as if glimpsed through sea spray. Synthesizers, Rhodes, piano, dulcimer, winds, spinetta, celesta, bells, electronics and field recordings form the core palette, with Vitiello layering them not for maximal impact but for depth: a chord that blooms and then frays at the edges, a bell chime that hangs like a buoy in the mix, a Rhodes smear that feels half‑melody, half‑weather. Each track behaves like a fragment carried by wind – a blurred message, a misplaced memory, something approaching meaning but never quite arriving.
The ensemble around him reinforces that sense of suspended narrative. Co‑writer and co‑producer Heith threads guitars, bass and electronics through the arrangements, sometimes as barely there halos, sometimes as thick, humming undercurrents. Renato Grieco’s viola da gamba and bass tug the music toward an uncanny early‑music register, while Stefano Costanzo’s drums and small percussion (bells, crotali, woodblock, bowl and objects) give the rhythms a tactile, off‑kilter spine, more like creaks and knocks in a hull than straightforward backbeats. Caraluce’s accordion and Daniel Kinzelman’s sax and clarinet, especially on track 4, widen the horizon, hinting at folk, chamber jazz and harbour‑side fanfares without ever settling into any of them.
Voices move through this landscape like passing weather systems. Vitiello sings himself, but shares the vocal space with Heith, Antonina Nowacka and Martyna Basta, whose appearances feel less like features and more like sudden openings in the cloud cover. Their lines – set to lyrics by Vitiello on tracks 2 and 5, by Heith on track 3, and by Basta on track 6 – don’t explain so much as intensify the mood: half‑heard phrases, devotional fragments, murmured hooks that dissolve back into reverb. Often the voice behaves like another instrument, a smear of harmony or a distant call across water rather than a narrative anchor, reinforcing the album’s pull toward suggestion over statement.
Behind the scenes, the record bears the imprint of a strong visual and spatial imagination. Mixed by Eraclio Pagliuca and Francesco Sodano at The Vessel Recordings and mastered by Mathieu Savenay, Notes from the Air has the depth and grain of a film soundtrack: sounds feel placed at differing distances, sometimes close enough to touch, sometimes just at the edge of perception. Artwork by Kenshiro Caravaggio Carena, photography by Salvatore Pastore and graphic design by Giovanni Difronzo extend the seagull’s ambiguous symbolism into images: grace and clumsiness, height and wreckage, the horizon as both promise and limit.
