Here at SoundOhm, we’re intimately involved with the concerns facing the contemporary landscape of music. Because our primary focus is getting great music into the hands of as many people as possible, we’re often aware of how quickly albums often go out of print, keeping them from reaching everyone that they should, and allowing them to quickly fall out of the consciousness. Especially in an era so focused on historical reissues and archival releases, contemporary artists can be most at risk. For this reason, among others, we’re thrilled to shine some light on the return of Giuseppe Ielasi’s incredible album Aix. Originally issued in 2009 on Taylor Deupree's 12k label, and now reissued by Keplar - belonging to their new reissue initiative focused on essential electronic albums from the 90's and 00's - it’s a free-standing, singular effort by one of the most important voices on the Italian electroacoustic scene. It’s a heavy favourite that didn’t get nearly enough attention the first time around.

Milanese guitar player and composer, Giuseppe Ielasi, has been a crucial voice in the Italian experimental scene since the 1990s, releasing a steady stream of forward thinking recordings of his own, working within numerous projects - Bellows, Eselsohr, Labfield, Medves, Oreledigneur, Rain Text - all the while extending his support for the broader context by running a number of noteworthy imprints like Senufo Editions, Fringes, Schoolmap, and Bowindo. While reasonably vast in range, Ielasi belongs to the more abstract and intricate temperaments of electroacoustic practice, rigorously balancing careful abstractions within a landscape of harmonic beauty and tension.

Composed and recorded in Aix-en-Provence during the Autumn of 2008, Aix is a strikingly timeless collection of 9 minimalist soundscapes that build layered atmospheres around rhythmic grids. Departing from the system of ons and offs that guides many of Ielasi’s improvised efforts, while relying heavily on a system of randomization, fragmented impressions, drawing on short samples of percussive objects, drums, piano, trumpet, guitar, and synthetic textures, gather as an endlessly surprising series of events that hybridize a diverse number of conceptions of electroacoustic practice into a cohesive whole. Flirtations with skittish visions of minimal techno, drone, ambient music lay the foundation for the remarkably seductive body of sound that has been infiltrated by the trojan horse of experimental ideas and approaches that imbue it with bristling life.

Imbued with an amazing sense of clarity - a vast palette of sounds dancing in a spatialized field of echoes, reverb, and the stereo image - Aix is one of those rare albums that transforms the synthetic into a form that feels wholly organic. An immersive journey from start to finish, we can’t express how happy we are to see this one return in the capable hands of Keplar. Not only does it activate an important return of a definitive effort, but, in a landscape that moves forward at an ever quickening pace, it opens a rarely available window into the recent past.