This album was inspired by Italian film director Michaelangelo Antonioni, who filmed his movie "Red Desert" in the industrial area of Ravenna, the Piallassa Valley, in 1964. This also happens to be the year and location where the author of this album was born. The album consists of a single 71 minute track consisting of found sounds and field recordings recorded where the movie was filmed, as well as samples from the film and acoustic guitar played by a musician from the area. It doesn't seem like a coincidence that the name of the label releasing the album is Boring Machines; as this album was recorded in an industrial area, there's plenty of droning mechanical sounds. If you play this album while someone in the room next to you is vacuuming or running a washing machine or something, there's plenty of this album that you might not even notice is happening. This can get kind of frustrating, because the musical elements of this album are actually really lovely. The first few minutes consist of a simple but incredibly beautiful Eno-ish ambient section, followed a few minutes later by an even more beautiful section of processed acoustic guitar, mixed with birds chirping, running water, and various mechanical and/or electronic drones. After a half hour, some dialogue samples appear, and the music goes almost silent for 10 minutes, until some backwards dialogue comes in (this sounds really unsettling if you've forgotten the album was on, which is usually what has happened at this point whenever I've listened). The last half hour of the album goes back from near silence to field recordings.

This seems like an intensely personal album, and perhaps it might make a little more sense with visuals. I really enjoy the first half hour, I think the composer has some interesting ideas and uses some very interesting composition and mixing techniques. The near silence and backward masking can be unsettling and distracting, though, and the concluding half hour of mostly field recordings seems like a bit of a letdown after the first part of the album. I guess i'll just have to take a trip to Italy in order to fully make sense of this disc. 6/10 -- Paul Simpson (17 December, 2008)