Having already blown minds this year with their release of Sun Ra's Live in Roma 1980 and Henry Krutzen's Silances, Holidays Records returns with two more towering triumphs: an incredible new rendering of Luigi Nono’s game-changing, first ever chamber work from 1980, “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima”, by Quartetto Maurice, and "Oh! Uomo", an engrossing work of contemporary musique concrete by the Italian composer Andrea Penso. Occupying markedly different spheres for radical experimentalism, they're easily among the most striking releases we've encountered so far in 2024.

Since their founding during the early years of the new millennium, the Italian imprint, Holidays Records, has stood at the vanguard of forward thinking sound, building a carefully curated catalog of releases that collectively build context and conversation across numerous avenues of exploration - contemporary and historical sitting side by side - within the wider field of experimental and improvised music, via stellar LPs by Cairo Free Jazz Ensemble, Jean-Yves Bosseur, James Rushford, Delivery Health, Henning Christiansen, Four Horsemen, Maria Monti, Sun Ra, and a whole lot more. With every subsequent release, Holidays has seemed to manage to up their game, and this is unquestionably the case with their latest, an astounding rendering of Luigi Nono’s “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” by Quartetto Maurice - one of the most celebrated ensembles currently working in the fields of experimental, contemporary, and electronic music - and “Oh! Uomo”, an incredible new LP by the Italian composer Andrea Penso. Radically different, while equally infused with brilliant ideas, cresting on engrossing sounds, with each Holidays further expands their mission of delivering some of the most rigorous and exciting music on the contemporary scene.

Born in Venice in 1924, Luigi Nono was among the most radical and important Italian composers to emerge during the post-war period. A member of the Italian Resistance during the Second World War, and remaining pointedly anti-fascist, where a great many of his American and European peers veered away from political and topical matters - preferring to dedicate themselves to more abstract or formal concerns - Nono was profoundly political: a one man revolution, whose work remains a window into the creative and political potential of sound.

Nono’s music emerged from the ashes of war - a voice in a social and intellectual landscape trying to cope with what had been, attempting to build a new, better world, drenched in Marxism (he officially joined the Communist Party in 1952), before, as the 60s and 70s unfolded, becoming a voice in the international worker and student struggles and the fight against the Vietnam War. While, by the end of the 1970s and early 80s, the explicitly political content in Nono’s work became slightly less pronounced, all of the fire and human concern remained until his passing in 1990. This is unquestionably apparent in “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima”, a piece commissioned by the city of Bonn for the 30th Beethoven Festival, which was composed between July 1979 and January 1980, and first performed on 2 June 1980 in Bad Godesberg, by the LaSalle Quartet. A crucially important work in the later canon of Nono’s output, alluding to themes and approaches that would define his coming years, Holidays’ release of Quartetto Maurice’s - Georgia Privitera (violin), Laura Bertolino (violin), Francesco Vernero (viola) and Aline Privitera (cello) - striking rendering of this brilliant work, marking the centenary of Nono’s birth, brings all of its potency quietly roaring into the present context.

While it belongs to Luigi Nono’s fourth decade of activity at the forefront of avant-garde music, “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is the first piece of chamber music in his oeuvre. While considerably smaller in the ensemble of instruments, it retains all of the monumentality, dramatic contrasts, and expressiveness, for which the composer is known within the work’s intricate microstructures, through which Nono explores the extremes of stillness. In the words of Juerg Stenzl, the “Quartet consists of stillness as well as sound, of many and long pauses. It is like an archipelago of sound emerging from that stillness only to fade again and again into those pauses. By “fragments” is meant here an extremely fragile web, which appears open on all sides and repeatedly assumes a state of motionlessness, even within the islands of sound, rather than a strict linear progression from the first note to the final chord”. Critically regarded as a “turning point work” that foreshadows Prometeo (1984/85), an extreme chamber music work, “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is both private and political. Reflecting on the shifts in his own work during this period, the composer stated: “I have not changed at all. Even tenderness, the private, has its collective, political side. Therefore my String Quartet is not the expression of a new retrospective line in me, but rather my current position of experimentation: I want the great, rebellious affirmation with the minimum means”.

A woven tapestry of rises and falls that make incredible demands on its players, Quartetto Maurice’s rendering of “Fragmente - Stille, An Diotima” is nothing short of a thing of beauty, microscopic in detail and space, while tense and furious as anything Nono ever composed. It is a masterstroke of experimental chamber music of the highest order.

Last year, Holidays delivered “Ad Invisibilia”, their first LP working with the composer Andrea Penso. It totally blew our minds, making his return to the label with “Oh! Uomo” that much more exciting. Penso has been active on the Italian experimental scene for the better part of two decades, working within collaborative projects like Surava and We Wait for the Snow, as well as issuing more than a dozen releases under the moniker Selaxon Lutberg. He is also part of the collective that runs Canti Magnetici, in addition to running his own imprint, the widely celebrated Invisibilia Editions, since 2020. Increasingly, over the last few years, Penso has stepped from behind the curtain of moniker and begun issuing work under his own name, “Oh! Uomo” - the first vinyl pressing of a tiny cassette edition, issued by Canti Magnetici in 2022 - being the most recent.

“Oh! Uomo” comprises tape-loop pieces composed by Penso. The first, "Oh! Uomo (Parte I)”, is based on a fragment of Béla Bartók's "Der Stampfer (Stamping Dance)", from his folk music studies. The opening sequence, recorded on magnetic tape, was cut and transformed into a tape loop, then manipulated analogically and digitally to change its tone and progression. Eerie and strikingly beautiful, warped melodies unfurl in semi-broken states through a gauzy haze, as though they are being heard across vast expanses of time to a startling effect, producing something incredibly captivating from the simplest of means.

The second piece, "Oh! Uomo (Diaspora)”, is constructed from two overlapped and manipulated tape loops: one an Armenian folk melody for harmonium solo recorded in the early 20th century, and the other a modern dance audio cassette, found by chance in a van parking lot in Turin. Inspired by the work of Angela Ricci Lucchi and Yervant Gianikian, to whom the piece is dedicated, "Oh! Uomo (Diaspora)” takes on a stranger sense of abstraction across the album’s second side, sculpting ribbing ambiences from obscured fragments of voice and droning, subdued harmonium, as it draws the ear toward the monumentality found in the tiniest details.

Easily some of the most engaging contemporary tape collage work we’ve encountered in recent years, Andrea Penso’s “Oh! Uomo” is one of those albums that can singlehandedly infuse a deep sense of hope in the future of musique concrete.