donato dozzy & daniele di gregorio: buchla & marimba

Master Italian minimalist Donato Dozzy meets percussionist Daniele Di Gregorio on the first trip for Maga Circe Musica, a new label set up by Dozzy and Alicia Carrera. It’s a slow & hypnotic exposition somewhere between Daniel Schmidt’s gorgeous 'In My Arms, Many Flowers’, Reichian Minimalism and Raster Noton’s classic, pristine grid-worship. ‘Buchla & Marimba’ extends Dozzy’s increasingly experimental vectors into ‘floor-adjacent forms of rhythm-driven minimalism that hearkens back to Steve Reich’s phasing rhythmelodies and the kind of sublime experiments explored by Daniel Schmidt & The Berkley Gamelan, also converging influence from the jazz genius of Don Cherry and the organic electro-acoustic works of Jonathan Fitoussi. But for all that wealth of influence and wide-ranging inputs, the results are effortlessly enjoyable and self-evident, rippling with a gentle, lysergic magick that percolates between the six parts, from the polymetric pointillism of ‘Sessione 1’, to the freckled lilt of ‘Sessione 2’, finding a spell-binding sort of West African cadence in ‘the 3rd, and practically dematerialising into stereo-pinging widescreen on the final two parts.