Listening to Andrea Polato and Marco Dalle Luche is like overhearing a conversation between erudite friends talking for the pleasure and surprise they can offer to each other. Neither shows off, each listens and responds to the other. Together they create worlds and scenes that pulse and sing with the simplicity that only confident mastery can achieve. The only way to listen is to give it your whole attention and stick with it as long as it rolls. Miss one shift, like missing a word or a phrase in that brilliant conversation, and you’re not going to get the full story.
Being a pre-digital dullard, I assumed Satelliti were a drums, bass and Fender Rhodes trio. Each element is present of course, but bass notes are manipulated from a sequencer with the freedom to make changes when the mood takes them. It works very well on an album that has a very spontaneous live feel.
Far more people in pop and roll these days have a "musical education" to call on. SATELLITI used theirs to appreciate and assimilate a very wide range of influences. You might hear the jazz, you might hear the echoes of house and rhythm and blues, you might hear Steve Reich: but that would be your education showing. To me, the essence of Transister is a confident sense of pleasure and tempo. It’s like these two professors can just jam all day without repeating and without losing the plot.
"Voltage" opens with a burst of gloopy sounds and very eloquent drumming. Like Kraftwerk eating too many sweets. That passes very quickly and surges of really tight drum/bass riff crescendos set a template that, broadly speaking, is adopted for the whole album. Cunningly, "Canada" that comes next cools the mood and changes the dynamic jus t long enough to make the listener come out of the hypnosis they had involuntarily entered during "Voltage". Such shifts in levels of consciousness recur throughout the album.
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Each of the eight tunes is distinct and there is a nod to the DJ set in the longer rhythm of the whole album. It keeps moving on but the creativity seems endless. There's a touch of spoken word too, on the soulful "Brother Green", sneaking in like a bashful visitor from 80s art rock.
The Cuckundoo label doesn’t issue albums as part of a business plan. If one turns up it's because Ben Winbolt-Lewis loves the music, and that's that. I don't always share his enthusiasms, but in this case I think he has found a treasure.
http://satelliti.org
http://www.cuckundoorecords.com/artist/satelliti
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