In the midst of an incredible run of forward momentum that has witnessed incredible recent releases by Charlemagne Palestine, Bill Fontana, Anima-Sound, Charlotte Moorman, and Gil J. Wolman, not to mention those killer drops by John Tchicai on their sub-imprint, Formal Ibera, Alga Marghen returns with a truly thrilling new rendering of the renowned Italian composer Giuseppe Chiari’s groundbreaking ‘Intervalli’, composed between 1950-1956. Never available in its complete form, this remarkable gesture of post-war avant-garde musicality - stunningly played by the pianist, Reinier van Houdt - remains timeless and captivating, while simultaneously prefiguring Minimalism, Conceptualism, and systems-based music in entirely singular ways that set him apart from his peers, in addition to laying the groundwork for many artists working within Fluxus, the movement that he would later join.

Over the course of nearly three decades of activity, the Italian imprint, Alga Marghen, has continuously cast light into the shadows of historical sound practice, offering particular focus to underappreciated artifacts at the juncture of visual art, sound-art, experimental music, and sound-poetry. With each subsequent release, the label has helped to reform our understanding of the 20th century, and the voices that made it what it was. What arguably makes Alga Marghen’s initiative so distinct, is how often its releases blur long-held notions of categorization and location, encountering specific artists moving fluidly through the worlds of fine art and sound / music in ways that confound expectation, as in the case of Giuseppe Chiari, the focus of their latest release, ‘Intervalli’ (1950-56), their first to delve into the remarkable world of the only member of Fluxus’ Italian arm. Marking the first ever complete rendering of one of the composer and multidisciplinary artist’s most beloved and important early works - radically reducing musical parameters on mathematical and rational grounds - recorded by the pianist, Reinier van Houdt, during 2025 in the Netherlands, this remarkable, twelve-part work composed during the first half of the 1950s places Chiari at the forefront of the musical avant-garde of that moment, prefiguring Minimalism by decades with his sparse punctuations of tone. Illuminating and profoundly beautiful, this stunning LP radically expands our access to Chiari’s incredibly important, but all too often overlooked musical interventions with the cultural landscape, adding an essential piece to a puzzle that has been previously explored by noteworthy imprints like Die Schachtel and Slowscan.

Born in Florence in 1926, Giuseppe Chiari was among the most important and groundbreaking figures to emerge within Italy’s post-war cultural landscape, bridging the realms of music and interdisciplinary artist practice in groundbreaking ways that had few equivalents at the time. An undeniable polymath on multiple fronts, Chiari studied piano and composition, as well as mathematics and engineering, allowing a unique synthesis between those fields to help define his earliest musical compositions. While remarkably distinct, Chiari belonged to a group of Florentine artists that included noteworthy figures like Sylvano Bussotti, Daniele Lombardi, Giancarlo Cardini, Albert Mayr, Pietro Grossi, Marcello Aitiani and Sergio Maltagliati, who were drawn to creating at the juncture of the perceptual phenomena of sound, sign and vision, taking cues from precursors within the avant-garde like Futurism, Schoenberg, and the Bauhaus.

Chiari was noted for working across numerous disciplines in addition to music, including visual mediums like painting, collage, and photography, as well as encountering him blurring the boundaries between them through experimental research in visual music that began during the early 1960s, placing him as a clear ally to artists working within the emerging Fluxus movement, which he formally joined in 1962 as its only official Italian member. Over the coming years, Chiari would pen numerous philosophical texts advocating and illuminating singular methodologies and ideas, while emerging as a distinct voice in musical conceptualism, often creating some of that movement’s most noteworthy efforts. Remarkably, while the artist’s visual work and scores grace numerous institutional halls, his remarkable efforts in musical composition remain difficult to access, with only three full-lengths to date on Silenzio Edizioni, Die Schachtel, and Slowscan bringing it to life, making Alga Marghen’s brand new rendering of ‘Intervalli’ by the pianist Reinier van Houdt, that much more necessary and exciting.

‘Intervalli’, divided into 12 parts that were composed between 1950 and 1956, represents one of Chiari’s earliest and most noteworthy complete compositions. Fascinatingly, while pointedly radical and forward thinking, it entirely sidesteps the music zeitgeist of its day - 12 tone Serialism - demarcating an entirely distinct proximity of rigorous music conceptualism that foreshadows numerous evolutions in musical approach that would come to be broadly embraced within the cultural landscape during subsequent decades. As Gabriele Bonomo illuminates in his liner notes that accompany Alga Marghen’s release of the work, ‘Intervalli’ stemmed from Chiari’s desire to “develop an aesthetic process that was consistent with (and inseparable from) a coherent theoretical framework.. [that] would come to define, in a metalinguistic sense, his entire future musical research and, more generally, the conceptual dimension of his work”. In pursuit of this, the composer can be observed establishing a hybrid that utilizes his training as both a radical artist and highly rational mathematician, embracing a concept of ‘logical arrangement of sound elements’ that arranges sequence of sounds through less controlled system of repetitions of variants or invariants, leading to a “radical narrowing of the musical parameters - yet liberated by the potential of their undefined combinations.” As such, not only can ‘Intervalli’ be perceived as a precursor to musical Minimalism through its remarkable use of tonal, rhythmical, and structural constraint, but also to systems-based music and creative conceptualism - form following ideas - at large.

Through its singularity within its own contemporary landscape, as well as what it alludes to and prefigures, ‘Intervalli’ stands as one of the most groundbreaking avant-garde compositions of the 1950s. While a small number of its parts have emerged in recorded form previously, remarkably, for a work of such importance and stature, the entire 12 parts have never been fully recorded and released until the incredibly sensitive rendering by Reinier van Houdt, before us now. While the ideas that underscore them are very different, the closest cousins to ‘Intervalli’ are arguably the solo piano pieces recorded during roughly the same period by Morton Feldman, who was also at an early stage in his career during the first half of the 1950s. Both composers employed a similar sense of restraint and space, allowing slowly emerging piano tones to operate with equal weight to the resonant duration of rests between their sounding. Chiari, however, pointedly termed the sonorities he produced as sounds rather than notes, rejecting, as Bonomo points out: “any notion of a hierarchical organization of pitches… [to the extent that] the system or ‘play’ of ‘intervals’ enacts this denial on a level of symbolic representation”.

As such, ‘Intervalli’ is an early manifestation of systems based conceptual music, predating similar strategies embraced by members of Fluxus - the movement that Chiari would himself later join - during the following decade. Across the work’s 12 parts - beautifully played in this performance by Reinier van Houdt - there is a decided sense of timelessness, despite stemming from some of the most radically forward-thinking ideas of their moment. Many of the work’s moments don’t feel entirely out of place alongside the impressionism of Satie, Ravel, or Debussy, nor Feldman or Cage, as they unfurl their patterns and tonal conjunctions, ranging from a deep sense of spareness and space, to more flurried cascades that keep the listener riveted throughout.

Carving out a remarkable space between approachability and a singularly progressive approach to sound that is rare within post-war avant-garde music, Giuseppe Chiari’s ‘Intervalli’ doubles as a rigorous experiment in the potential of compositional meaning, so rich with ideas that they almost transcend to realms of music itself. Historically important on numerous dimensions, marking the first time the whole work has been released, Reinier van Houdt’s rendering reveals a groundbreaking artist during his earliest days, shattering perceptions connected to the who, what, when, and where of the emergence of conceptualism and systems-based music. Beyond all else, the beauty captured by this recording continues to reveal dimensions and unfold with every return listen.