Roberto Musci, Giovanni Venosta, Chris Cutler

In the late 1980s two globetrotting Milanese composers joined forces to produce an acclaimed and prescient record made in equal parts from their own performances and ethnic field recordings, a little in the manner of Eno/Byrne's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts - but rather more evolved. This 30th anniversary release includes some early pieces, not already available on CD made this way but, mainly, features the entirety of their score for Theodore Carl Dreyer's legendary silent film, Vampyr - performed by themselves and percussionist Chris Cutler - a mixture of acoustic and electronic resources in tableaux as stark as the movie itself.

'We started working together in 1985, mainly inspired by the works of the concrete-music masters, such as Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henry, the minimalist composing style of Steve Reich and Terry Riley, the piano ostinatos by Abdullah Ibrahim (AKA Dollar Brand) and by the works of Holger Czukay, more specifically Boat-woman song (with Rolf Dammers, 1969) and the album Movies (1979), together with My Life in the Bush of Ghosts by David Byrne & Brian Eno (1981), all landmarks of a "proto" world music, or at least for what we intended our music should sound like: a more or less complex mixture of elements from different musical cultures. We soon realized that some modal, atonal, or even microtonal samples taken from field recordings we made or simply "stole" from traditional music LPs, if wisely combined with "western" harmony and instruments, could alchemically generate a completely different music. Later, we tried to extend this process of transformation to any kind of sound, in time (chronologically, from the very beginning of musical history) and space (geographically, from every corner of the planet). Our soundtrack of Dreyer's Vampyr was one of our latest attempts to combine all these elements.