Audiopile Review: There was a very special moment in the development of electronic music when newly available digital technologies intersected with increasingly advanced analogue techniques. Laurie Spiegel’s ‘The Expanding Universe’ is the most widely recognized classic of this era. But David Behrman, Maggi Payne, Horacio Vaggione, and others were making similar moves. This music often had more in common with the harmonic bliss-out of minimalism than the alien klang of classic electro-acoustic music. There’s a reason so much of it came out on a label called Lovely Music. Some of the loveliest music at the intersection of digital innovation, analogue synthesis, and minimalist bliss was composed by Italy’s Roberto Cacciapaglia. Here are reissues of two classic Cacciapaglia albums, both of which are absolute slam dunks for experimental electronic music fans and neo-new age space cadets alike. ‘Sei Note in Logica’, from 1979, mixes the hypnotic arpeggios of New York minimalism with strange, computer-generated textures. ‘Sonanze’, from four years earlier, is an extremely ambitious opus, which blends harpsichord, strings, and brass with analog synths. It easily holds its own against the ambient classics of its era, while simultaneously standing alone and predicting the future. These albums should never be filed under ‘lesser-known’. These are classics of their era, which demand to be recognized as such.

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Roberto Cacciapaglia is an Italian composer and pianist who started out in the fertile Milan avant-garde scene of the 1970s, which included Franco Battiato, Giusto Pio, Lino Capra Vaccina, Francesco Messina, among others. After studying at the conservatory, he worked at RAI’s Studio of Musical Phonology – an electronic music laboratory similar to NDR/WDR in Germany, GRM/IRCAM in France or BBC Radiophonic Workshop.

Sonanze (Sonatas) is Cacciapaglia’s debut album, a monumental work that was recorded over a two-year period and released in 1975 via seminal German label Die Kosmischen Kuriere (Ohr). While a “sonata” is traditionally performed by easily distinguishable instrumentalists (often soloist and accompaniment) and with repeated structural themes, Cacciapaglia flips this hierarchical form on its head – blending harpsichord, strings, brass and analog synths to create ambient mini-soundtracks.

As the composer writes in the original sleeve notes, “I am aware, unfortunately, that I am a few millennia late in how I would like music to be understood, which today I find diluted in its primary powers, in an era that is destructive of essential values. Precisely for this reason, I want to search for it in depth and not on the surface, perhaps alternating the knob of a synthesizer with a marranzano (mouth harp).”

Mixed in quadrophonic surround-sound under the auspices of Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser (celebrated producer of Tangerine Dream and Ash Ra Tempel), Sonanze remains on the fringe of Kosmische realms. Each movement explores hypnotic rhythms, intuitive arrangements, musique concrète techniques and a pure psychedelic awakening.