On Animato the guitar of John Abercrombie is framed and supported by composer Vince Mendoza's quasi-orchestral use of synthesizers, while Jon Christensen's drums add acoustic commentary. Mendoza wrote six of the eight pieces. This 1990 album therefore sounds less like a guitar date than a set of compositions scored for guitar, electronics and drums. There is no bass player, and long synthesizer textures fill the low register instead.
The music was recorded in October 1989 at Rainbow Studio in Oslo, with Jan Erik Kongshaug engineering and Manfred Eicher producing. Abercrombie plays guitar and guitar synthesizer, Mendoza the synthesizers, and Christensen drums and percussion. The Norwegian drummer had been part of ECM's sound since the 1970s, for instance in Keith Jarrett's quartet with Jan Garbarek on Belonging (1974). Judd Miller is credited with synthesizer programming and the EVI, a wind-controlled electronic instrument. Abercrombie had already been extending his sound with guitar synthesizer on earlier ECM records, and Mendoza's writing gave that approach a full harmonic setting.
The opening Right Now, credited to Abercrombie and Christensen, is the one group improvisation, the guitar rising out of a dark electronic ground with drums circling around it. Agitato sets a sequencer-like pattern under the guitar, which then trades phrases with the drums before a classically inflected refrain. For Hope of Hope, the longest track at almost nine minutes, is slow and darkly anthemic, with Christensen working in colours rather than time. The album then closes on a lullaby, Mendoza's Ollie Mention, with Abercrombie at his most gentle.
Writing on the blog Between Sound and Space in 2012, Tyran Grillo argued that "the inclusion of Mendoza on this album was a stroke of genius". For him the record belongs to Christensen and Mendoza as much as to its leader, with Abercrombie still "a major melodic force on this date". He also heard Mendoza both extending what Abercrombie already implies and pushing the session into new territory.
This is the CD edition of ECM 1411, first released in 1990. It was reissued in October 2008 in the Touchstones series, forty ECM albums returned to print in card sleeves with their original artwork.
