When gazing over the expanse of 20th Century avant-garde music, few European projects can claim the seminal importance of Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza. Considered to be the first experimental composers collective, its membership included many of the most important figures of its era, each coming together in the spirit of collaboration, consciously intervening with long entrenched notions of authorship and the way art was understood to be made. Radical and deeply optimistic - deploying a remarkably open approach to hybridity of source and practice, even today, more than a half a century after its founding, the group’s earliest efforts still feel remarkably fresh and like a vision of the future which has yet to fully appear. Over the last few years we’ve been lucky enough to witness numerous reissues and archival releases which date from Il Gruppo’s astounding first decade of activity, notably Superior Viaduct’s beautiful edition of 1973’s self-titled release and Die Schachtel’s Azioni / Reazioni 1967-1969, bringing their crucial contributions back into the centre of the contemporary consciousness. Now, we’re thrilled to highlight the emergence of yet another crucial piece in the puzzle - the reissue of what is arguably the rarest artifact in their catalog - 1974’s Nuova Consonanza, reissued in a special replica edition by Cinevox.

Formed in Rome during 1964, over its years of activity, Gruppo di Improvvisazione Nuova Consonanza included an expanding and contracting cast of some of the most remarkable voices of its day - Franco Evangelisti, Ennio Morricone, Egisto Macchi, Walter Branchi, Roland Kayn, Frederic Rzewski, and numerous others. Creatively radical, drawing on jazz, serialism, musique concrete, and extended techniques - breaking with the divisions that largely defined the larger global avant-garde scene - sculpting a body of sound, like nothing before or since.

Nuova Consonanza, the collective’s fourth full-length release, issued by Cinevox in 1974, encounters the project at its sublime best. This incarnation features Macchi, Morricone, Evangelisti, Branchi, Giovanni Piazza, Jesús Villa Rojo, and Mario Bertoncini, each masterfully responding and intervening within an expanse of sound within which no one voice takes centre stage. Delicate acoustic textures sculpt an endlessly surprising sense of tactile space, penetrated by percussive interventions and atonal squeals, each in their own way defying a concise image of source. Wildly intelligent, and yet feeling so natural that these interactions of sound might have simply always been or appeared, Nuova Consonanza captures an archetypal vision of one of the most important bands in the history of the avant-garde - a singular, and entirely new vision of what improvisation and collaboration could be, which laid the groundwork for a countless number of artists who followed in their wake. This is where it all began.