Ansgar Wilken and Chris Dreier are Berlin-based visual artists as well as seasoned practitioners in many, often improvised, contexts of experimental music. Dreier started her experimental sound practice in the 1980s as a member of the legendary collective Die Tödliche Doris. Ansgar Wilken started his career out of Bremen, where he was a member of the post-rock band Ilse Lau and started his own label Happy Zloty, which is still active today. This album is the second duo release by Dreier and Wilken after the self-titled 2021 debut on Econore, and their first vinly release.

 

If surrealism was defined as the meeting of an umbrella and a sewing-machine on a dissecting-table, then this album is quite literally surrealism in sound. The recordings here are due to the meeting of an old East German mixing desk, a percussion kit, a modular synthesizer, and samples - whose mixture of language classes (hence the Italian title) and static noises is in itself a surrealist collage - in a DIY art space in Berlin Marzahn on a grim winter’s day. With Daniel Shushan’s operation of the mixer an integral part of the overall sound, the two long-form improvisations on this album navigate an uncharted territory which they create themselves as they go along. A territory in which rhythms and drones, hisses and clangs, structure and formlessness, tenderness and roughness constantly coalesce, dissolve, and reconfigure themselves. Like the best examples of free improvisation, they are a beautiful metaphor for the ever transitory and fleeting nature of life, in which renegotiation and adaption is the only real constant, and which can only ever be lived in the now. In that respect, the album title is not only humourous, but highly programmatic: „(Now) It’s time to do it.“

 

File under: improv, sound art