Forty years after their first recording session in Le Cave, Italy, on 16 June 1986, Capricorni Pneumatici return with The Commission, a project that treats anniversary not as nostalgia but as expanded territory. The release arrives in parallel with The Commission + The Event, an installation by artist Tomislav Török Terek in London, running from 19‑06‑2026 to 02‑07‑2026. Together, the CD and installation weave a continuous arc from the group’s early ritual‑ambient excavations to their contemporary electronic evolutions, binding decades of sonic research to a visual and spatial dramaturgy that feels both haunted and newly charged.
At the heart of Török Terek’s installation lies a chain of images and references: an “aether‑state, dream‑like” meditation on the Tunguska Event, the deadpan physicality of Buster Keaton, the existential stagecraft of Samuel Beckett, and other currents of synchronicity that converged while he listened intently to Capricorni Pneumatici’s soundscapes in his studio. Out of that listening grew the idea for The Commission + The Event, and, through collaboration with the group, the new CD release has come to coincide precisely with the installation’s opening. The Siberian explosion near the Podkamennaya Tunguska River on 17 June 1908 - a blast estimated between 3 and 50 megatons of TNT, reshaping forest and myth alike - becomes one of the conceptual pillars of the work: an invisible catastrophe radiating forward as shockwave, echo and unresolved question.
The CD centers on a sequence of long‑form compositions that function as discrete chambers inside this broader architecture. “UDLV” is a 19‑minute liturgical trance, layered with insect murmurs, nocturnal animal calls and ritual voices, building an eerie, immersive atmosphere inside a dark container that gently destabilizes the listener’s comfort zone. The piece feels like a nocturnal service held in a forgotten chapel, where the liturgy is conducted by non‑human presences and the human voice is just one more frequency in the swarm. “Polizei,” by contrast, revolves around a malfunctioning mechanical motion, punctuated by deep percussions. Over 13 minutes, its relentless, slightly off‑kilter mechanism leads the listener toward a suspended, undefined destination - a journey without arrival, anxiety compressed into rhythm and metal fatigue.
“Securite” stretches 16 minutes of hallucinatory textures across a submerged soundstage, where police sirens cut through like distant alarms filtered through water. The effect is that of an underwater dream sequence: familiar signals bent by refraction, authority rendered ghostly and half‑audible. With “London,” the record shifts into an 8‑minute descent through resonant, cavernous noise, expanding across a vast, echo‑filled sonic space. It feels both site‑specific and abstract: a city imagined as a hollow body whose internal chambers ring with accumulated sound, histories of control, movement and surveillance translated into reverberant turbulence. “KK” closes the cycle with a long‑form electronic session that evolves through non‑linear progression into a dramatic, enveloping soundscape, its arcs of tension and release refusing conventional narrative while still producing a powerful sense of passage.
In the London installation, these tracks are not simply played back; they are re-situated, folded into an environment that responds to their pressure. Török Terek’s work treats Capricorni Pneumatici’s catalogue as both material and subject: early ritual ambient pieces, mid‑period industrial drifts and recent electronic explorations are curated into a continuum that echoes the logic of The Commission. Soundscapes seep from speakers into architectural crevices; visual elements and spatial arrangements extend the music’s themes of control, collapse and trance. The Tunguska Event hovers over the entire setting as a kind of negative sun - an unseen detonation whose aftermath is registered not in rubble but in resonant air.
By aligning the CD release with The Commission + The Event, Capricorni Pneumatici and Török Terek create a rare kind of anniversary project: one that looks backward only to intensify the present. The featured tracks embody the group’s long-standing fascination with liturgy, machinery, surveillance and dream logic, while the installation opens those fascinations to new readings, connecting Italian underground history to global catastrophe, silent comedy to existential theatre, private listening to public space. For longtime followers, the bundle offers a deep immersion into the group’s evolving sound-world; for new listeners, it provides a powerful entry point into a body of work where ritual and noise, narrative and void, remain in constant, unsettling negotiation.
The Commission thus stands not just as a marker of forty years, but as a renewed statement of intent: a reminder that this project began in a small Italian venue in 1986 and now resonates through dark galleries, city echoes and conceptual shockwaves that reach all the way back to 1908.
