joel vandroogenbroeck: l'immagine del suono

Joel Vandroogenbroeck was an arranger, conductor, producer, and, above all, a unique multi-instrumentalist in the world of music. The Belgian artist was also famous for being the only permanent member of the group Brainticket and the main promoter of its creativity, often renewed with the contribution of exotic instruments. At the dawn of the Seventies, this versatile musician began a parallel life as a composer of singular music libraries tailored to comment documentary images. L'immagine del suono was one of them, originally released by Italy's Flirt Records and now reissued on vinyl by Musica Per Immagini for the first time. This album circulated, however, unnoticed in a limited number of copies among insiders, only rediscovered later by fans, thus raising Joel Vandroogenbroeck as a real pioneer of ambient and new age music. It is appropriate to consider the twelve short-lived pieces of L'immagine del suono as a sort of continuous and visionary experiment, with the addition of electronic gasps, a strong dose of inevitable psychedelia, fragments of synthesized jazz, all coming from experiences both internal and external, hallucinatory and hedonistic. All of this combined creates a mysterious and abstract hybrid. Sonic raw material is sculpted with artisanal care, at times twisted and cryptic, characterized by a transversal irony, to the point that the interference of rock elements in the course of the set divert the listener's attention and momentarily interrupt the flow of consciousness. L'immagine del suono is a concentrated example of the avant-garde, free from categorization of any kind, developed in a non-commercial key and, equally, is drawn from a direct line via what was previously expressed within the folds of the then contemporary works of Brainticket.