Amongst the pantheon of those voyagers who have conjured and executed upon burning questions of the capabilities in conveying emotional content in relation to synthesized, electronically produced and processed sounds, Alessandro Cortini must be added.
Italian-born (May 24, 1976), Alessandro’s arrival to the US in 1998 to pursue his musical career ultimately jolted him into the canon of this uniquely American voice and mode of expression. Cortini’s love of the Buchla Music Easel is just one of the megaphones to his ever-expanding yet distinctive voice. Born out of his experimentations in creative limitation in direct relation to decisive expression, and subsequently written and performed live on the Easel in a month – the Forse series blossomed during the period spent writing and recording the instrumental record Ghosts I-IV with Nine Inch Nails, and finally bore fruit as a trilogy of double LPs released by Important Records. Alessandro has spent considerable time performing lead electronics in addition to revisiting his initial instrumental forays in guitar for Nine Inch Nails and How To Destroy Angels, as well as continuing a solo project under the banner SONOIO (an Italian echo from “sono io” translating to “it’s me”) — though his recent masterful outputs with the Buchla system and beyond has truly stamped his musical articulation in a class all his own, with a growing familiarity and recognizability to his emotional voice in his albeit diverse exercises with his varying “bandmates” as he himself so endearingly calls his rotating cast of gear he employs in each different project.
Alessandro’s ongoing Sonno series on Dominick Fernow’s Hospital Productions label is a gorgeously “restrained yet oddly emotive” call-and-response with the Roland MC 202, playfully dancing out of the academically driven approaches that typically infiltrates the aesthetic of hardware enthusiasts. Following in 2015 with Risveglia, Cortini further develops the minimal on-tour recording series in a second album, adding the TB 303 as second instrument.
With Skarn (debut released on front line techno-experimentalist Shifted’s Avian label in late 2014) Cortini once again displayed his strengths as an interdisciplinary and incredibly talented producer and composer. His dialogue with the Metasonix forges a deepening, assimilative-yet-mutating integration into a more techno realm of sound, stamped with a dimension completely his own. Further works under the guise of Slumberman find spirit-collaborations with prominent techno/electronic label CLR and Den Haag’s notorious Panzerkreuz series, all contributing to Alessandro’s rise within the electronic music community as an important, masterful voice.
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