The always brilliant, electroacoustic journeyman, Nicola Ratti, returns with “Automatic Popular Music”, one of his most captivating records to date. A stunning piece of generative composition that almost entirely draws upon sounds created by automatisms programmed on modular synthesizers, placed in conjunction with tape loops of acoustic and digital pianos, it's an astoundingly seductive rethinking of Minimalism, balancing the razor’s edge between hypnotic repetition and the deconstructivity abstract.

At its best, experimental music is a creative realm, rich with ideas, conceptualism, and radical new ways of generating organizations of sound that challenge and rework the way we navigate the world around us, particularly at humanity’s expressive juncture with technology. Among the fascinating artists currently navigating and pushing the territory of exploration toward unanticipated depths is the multi-instrumentalist, Nicola Ratti. Building on a stunning series of albums in recent years, his latest, “Automatic Popular Music”, issued by the curatorial and editorial platform, LL, is arguably among the Milan-based artist’s most engrossing to date. A work of generative composition, issued as a beautiful limited edition LP, that confounds the boundaries between radical experimentalism and the seductions of pop, not to mention between the artist and his machines, we couldn’t think of a better record to start the body and brain percolating after the past hazy summer months.

For the better part of the last two decades, the Milan-based multi-instrumentalist, Nicola Ratti, has remained one of the shining lights in Italy’s localised scene of experimental electronic and electroacoustic music. Through a steady stream of striking solo LPs issued by Room40, Where To Now?, Holidays Records, Die Schachtel, and numerous other imprints, as well as within his duo with Giuseppe Ielasi, Bellows, he has simultaneously carved out a singular place in the global landscape of sound, creating a deeply personal music that engages both cutting edge, forward thinking ideas, and ground breaking approaches to technology.

“Automatic Popular Music”, Ratti’s latest, was recorded across the second half of 2023. The inner structures of the album’s eight pieces are rooted in repetitiveness in both their rhythmic and harmonic components, somehow alluding to a strange narrative that Ratti has set up in his statement about their underpinnings:

“Inside Automatic Popular Music there are two people sitting in a room, their backs to each other. One plays a piano with no particular attention to detail and tuning of the instrument, and another, sitting behind him, claps his hands on his own legs. They do not see each other, they never look at each other, they can only listen to each other, look around. The room is large enough, it is daytime, there are four windows through which enough light enters to illuminate the objects and furniture with objects on them. October, the temperature is great and outside the window there are many people and all these people are dancing to the music of another record.”

Fascinatingly, it seems that, across the duration of “Automatic Popular Music” whatever flirtations with elements of popular music seem to have occurred by chance, as Ratti deferred to the choices made by his systems, entrusting it with the task of generating the melodic patterns and harmonic structures of each piece. That said, for its roots in minimalism and nods to aspects of electronic dance music, the eight pieces that appear on the LP push toward surprisingly abstract realms, never dispelling a shadowy sense of mystery as the album moves from delicate and pastoral percussiveness that calls to mind classic Japanese New Age, through bristling structures that underscore seductively deconstructed melodies, pulsing tones, and brooding ambiences, collectively amounting to one of the most deeply engaging and curious records that we’ve heard in recent months.

Once again Nicola Ratti has captivated our hearts, ears and minds with “Automatic Popular Music”.