Giovanni Venosta, Roberto Musci

Roberto Musci and Giovanni Venosta's Urban And Tribal Portraits, back in a new pressing from Soave: LP on clear vinyl, edition of 200 copies.

At the beginning of the 1980s the composer Roberto Musci returned to Italy after a decade wandering the globe - drifting between Africa, India, and the Near and Far East, studying music, making field recordings, and collecting instruments. In 1984 this journey culminated in the release of his first album, The Loa Of Music, a sonic distillation and near perfect encapsulation of the democratic hybridity at the heart of the Italian avant-garde. A short time after, Musci joined a friend, the composer Giovanni Venosta, to work on his first recorded effort, Olympic Signals, conceived as a partial response to The Loa Of Music. Once again a stunning and seminal piece of artistry emerged. Each represents an important beginning for both composers, and following Olympic Signals, for much of their respective careers, their names and ideas would exist collaboratively, side by side.

Urban And Tribal Portraits is the second of their collaborative duo LPs, originally issued by ReR in 1988. The album takes the pair's investigation, reference, and incorporation of diverse, global traditions of music to new heights. While The Loa Of Music was largely created from fragments of field recordings made during Musci's travels, threaded with his own musical interventions, and Olympic Signals responded with a rippling world of Minimalist composition, Urban And Tribal Portraits creates a new synthesis - a hybridic, global music, standing outside of culture and geography. Part of a broad quest for a new form of sonic democracy, the result is an astounding patchwork - the music of a hypothetical, lost avant-garde tribe, so elegant, seductive, and intoxicating that, once heard, it's hard to imagine living without it. Created on a vast range of instruments - from base elements offered by the human voice and a Jew's harp, to perfectly placed guitar arpeggios, to visionary interventions by a myriad of synthesizers and tape experiments - it is unquestionably one of the great unheralded works from the end of the 1980s.

Urban And Tribal Portraits has remained out of print for decades, and when not commanding staggering prices on the collector's market, virtually unobtainable. It deserves to be heard by everyone. Now available in a clear vinyl edition of 200 copies. Thrilling for the heart and mind from back to front, and as essential as records come.

LP, clear vinyl. Limited edition of 200 copies.