*150 copies limited edition. Contains an added bonus track: "Biarmonico"* Vala, Or The Four Zoas surfaces from a white‑hot stretch in the life of Capricorni Pneumatici, captured only weeks after the sessions for IX‑TAB and in direct parallel with the gestation of Nibbas. The same constellation of albums - later restored alongside Al‑Azif and Witchcraft - sketches a moment when the project’s language crystallised, and this record feels like its most inward, visionary chapter. The core remains rigorously electronic: FM synthesis via the DX7 and the CX5, machines that were already becoming the project’s primary alphabet of timbre. Here that alphabet is written with almost ascetic discipline. No external processing, no outboard gear, no effects in the usual sense; every sound is committed straight onto a Tascam Porta One cassette system, preserving hiss, saturation, and the delicate instability of tape as essential parts of the composition rather than technical compromises. The result is an album that feels intimate and tactile, as if the circuitry itself were breathing in the room.
Originally released on cassette in 1989 and now restored for CD through the collaboration between Eighth Tower Records and SSS Production, Vala, Or The Four Zoas documents a shift in focus from shock to slow revelation. The genesis of the music lies in a fascination with timbres capable of autonomous evolution: the bi‑harmonic voices of the DX7, whose stacked, interlocking overtones unfold gradually, carving out suspended zones that function as genuine narrative matrices. Pieces are less “tracks” than slowly mutating environments, where harmonic strata drift, bend and recombine over time. Within these evolving slabs of sound, Capricorni Pneumatici find their most dreamlike and meditative dimension, a tendency already latent in earlier work but expanded here with a new patience and deliberation. The music does not rush toward climax; it allows listeners to inhabit the in‑between states where resonance, echo and memory blur.
Around this FM core, the group weave a dense weave of realities: field recordings, concrete sounds, acoustic residues and materials captured in the legendary “Cave,” the underground space where the earliest releases were forged. You hear doors and ducts, metallic clatter, the ghost of a voice, the scrape of contact on surfaces, all folded into the electronic mass via tape overdubs and environmental bleed. Metallic percussion and room tone become recurring glyphs, binding Vala to IX‑TAB and the other early chapters in a clear line of aesthetic continuity. This is one of Capricorni Pneumatici’s defining signatures: the refusal to separate “pure” synthesis from the dirt of the world, treating both as equal actors in the same ritual. Elsewhere, entire sections are constructed solely from environmental recordings driven through a Revox A77 used as a delay device, pushing the music towards a sparse, essential, almost monastic form of musique concrète, where each sound event stands exposed, with no harmonic comfort to soften it.
The Blakean title, invoking Vala, or The Four Zoas, does not translate into literal sonic illustration, yet it offers a resonant lens through which to hear the work. Blake’s fractured myth cycles - visions of divided selves, prophetic dreams, and apocalyptic landscapes - rhyme with the album’s ritualistic, shamanic and hallucinatory undertow. The music behaves like a nocturnal ceremony enacted in the dark of the psyche: FM chords as luminous apparitions, tape‑loop ghosts circling like half‑remembered entities, percussive clangs marking thresholds between inner zones. Rather than narrating Blake’s universe, Vala, Or The Four Zoas seems to occupy a similar psychic terrain, where time folds and archetypes whisper through texture. In this light, the record emerges as one of Capricorni Pneumatici’s richest and most layered statements - a work in which technology, place and myth fuse into a single, slow‑burning vision that feels both historically rooted and eerily outside of time.
