*100 copies limited edition* There is a strange form of clairvoyance that does not look to the future, but digs back into the earth, into the ground itself. Etruscan mythology tells that the small Tages who emerged from the furrow of a plowed field at Tarquinia was not an ordinary child, but memory itself—coming from the earth’s innards—to dictate its divinatory secrets. For the seventh installment of the Drove catalog, the ensemble Oracle Column turns this myth into sound material, treating magnetic tape and beaten earth as the same thing: surfaces meant to hold ancient impressions.
Born from a vision by Devid Ciampalini and Andrea Rusconi, Tages is an apparatus for radical improvisation recorded at Redroom Studio in Pisa in November 2021. Here, the most muddy, spiritual jazz fuses with acousmatic and ethno–avant-garde music, moving away from the reassuring drift of the New Age and instead finding dense, hypnotic, and exquisitely underground energy. The sound unfolds through a fascinating dualism: on one side, analog electronics and tape manipulations that create a constant haze; on the other, the acoustic physicality of vibraphones, tablas, flutes, santur, and Rhodes. Enriching this mediamic session is an array of exceptional collaborators who move across the album’s eight tracks like a phantom collective: Ariel Kalma, Giovanni Di Domenico, Pietro Santangelo, Ozgur Yalcin, and Michele Guglielmi.
The name Oracle Column evokes the Jachin and Boaz columns—initiatory gateways of sacred places. This cassette works exactly like that: a threshold, a sonic crossing between the warmth of magnetic tape and the mysteries buried in the mud of the Mediterranean. A straight, powerful disc—without concessions.
