not waving: redacted

With the first vinyl edition of Not Waving's absorbingly raw sophomore solo LP Redacted (2013), Alessio Natalizia reminds fans of his nascent psychedelic side in light of his lucid, "schizo" deviations on the Animals album for Diagonal. While there's a mutual sense of technoid momentum to both albums, Redacted is a far gauzier, free-form and sensual beast; one richly steeped in proto/post-club atmospheres and allowing his imagination to run away with itself. Conceptually, Redacted pursues the "classified" themes of his remote viewing-inspired Umwelt LP (2013) into even murkier departments, drawing subtle parallels between the cold war atmospheres that birthed original post punk, industrial and proto-techno, and the current pallor of socio-political unrest. Omitting the original tape's expansive closer for the sake of a single LP cut, this vinyl version plays out like an alternative soundtrack to scenes in the overgrown, radioactive zones of Tarkovsky's Stalker (1979), using an anachronistic palette of analog machinery to emphasize a sense of fluid, shimmering motion and out-of-place-and-timelessness that genuinely goes straight to the head with trippy effect. Swampy, slow techno horror themes vacillate with decayed pastoral panoramas and windows of synthetic optimism, both lush and disquietingly needling, using dissonance and sweeps of hazy noise to ultimately spell out a foreboding but dreamlike sort of electronic subterfuge and suspense that resonates with the nostalgic Stranger Things (2016) score as much as Leyland Kirby's Intrigue & Stuff series. Redacted was originally issued in edition of 100 gold tapes in 2013. Newly remastered for vinyl by Matt Colton at Alchemy.