Angelo Petronella

Angelo Petronella is an avowed devotee of acousmatics, a musique concrete practice that encourages as much disassociation as possible between the sound on record and the source it was taken from. And though many of Sintesi da un diario's sounds are culled from such well-worn locales as children's playgrounds, country landscapes, and factory floors, repeated exposure reveals a composer intent on draining any familiarity in the pursuit of a total removal of all convention. Birdsong is pulled taut, returning anew as electronic mimicry, while water cascades and flows into digital rivers of cold, pristine sound. But it's the adolescent voices that form the common thread throughout half of the album's eight tracks, as shrieks and cries are repurposed with increasing vigor across the disc's four "Tratto" pieces. Here Petronella displays a deft knack for clever processing and an intuitive grasp of placement; by the time the album closes on "Tratto 4," the same chorus of schoolchildren has been combined with glacial drones and artificial insect chirping into a seamless patchwork that creates its own internal logic. (Citypaper, 2007)