One of the hazards of reviewing drone and ambient albums is the overuse of words like expansive. And yes, Giulio Aldinucci‘s Materia is expansive. Glad I could clear that up. It is also luminous. Another overworked adjective. But I’ll come back to that.
The title translates as “Matter,” and Aldinucci has spoken of sculpting the album by removing excess material from the sound mass. Listening to Materia, that image feels entirely appropriate. Every sound appears carefully weighed, every layer stripped back until only its essential behaviour remains. Nothing feels ornamental.
The opening “Not Here” is also the album’s most articulated piece. It perfectly captures the tension between accumulation and subtraction that defines the entire record. As its most dynamic composition, it could easily have occupied the centre of the album as a climax. Instead, Aldinucci places it first. It feels almost as though he says everything he wanted to say in the opening eight minutes, freeing himself to concentrate thereafter on the journey without worrying about the destination. Harmonics continually oscillate between warmth and cold while, almost imperceptibly, a melodic contour begins to emerge from what initially resembles a shifting weather system of distorted drones. There is something unexpectedly romantic about it. Full of longing, even heartache. It made me think of someone who knows they are making love to their partner for the last time.
“In A Shadow of Noise” immediately begins removing material. The music becomes less concerned with harmonic expansion than with the gradual redistribution of energy inside the sound field. Low frequencies acquire greater physical presence without ever becoming oppressive, while textures slowly roughen around the edges, allowing noise to behave almost like another harmonic component.
The emotional centre of the album lies in the paired compositions “Cenere e Onde Lontane” [Ashes and Distant Waves] and “Come Luce, In Sogno” [Like Light, In a Dream]. Here the appearance of distant vocalisations quietly transforms the music. If I am allowed to use the word “spiritual” in a review of a drone record, this is where Materia becomes exactly that. The voices drift in and out of focus like fragments of memory, illuminating the album from within while introducing an unmistakable human warmth. The harmonic field suddenly feels more vertical, more open, as though the music had briefly lifted itself free from gravity.
“Never” redirects the album once again. It is darker, denser and less organic, concentrating on texture more than harmonic bloom. Built upon a low, persistent hum, fine granular activity continually chisels away at the surrounding texture.
The closing “Sera” [Evening] feels like the natural consequence of everything that precedes it. Harmonics soften, the modular textures become increasingly delicate, and a quiet melancholy gradually settles over the music. There is no final statement, simply the impression that the material has reached a point where nothing further needs to be added—or removed.
And yes, Materia is expansive. More importantly, it glows from within.
To expand on the materiality of his latest album, we reached out directly to Giulio Aldinucci.
In your notes you describe Materia as shaping sound by “removing excess material from the sound mass,” almost like a sculptor working with stone. How did this idea develop, and did thinking of sound as physical matter fundamentally change the way you composed compared to previous albums such as Disappearing in a Mirror or Shards of Distant Times?
Ever since Borders and Ruins, and especially on the two albums you mentioned, I have always worked from particularly dense, highly tactile sound masses created through granular synthesis, from which I then structured the compositions. This approach reached an even greater level of complexity in the works collected on Materia.
On one side, there is an extremely rich, dense sonic material; on the other, the need to shape it using the appropriate tools. Editing therefore became an integral part of the compositional process through the use of extremely precise static and dynamic equalizers, allowing me to work directly on the harmonic content by smoothing or removing frequencies with surgical selectivity.
The radical difference between the initially raw material and the final result achieved through this process of “removal” ultimately convinced me to give the album the title Materia.
One of the most remarkable aspects of Materia is its treatment of time. Although the music unfolds slowly, it never feels static. The smallest spectral shifts, changes in density, and subtle rearrangements of microscopic sonic fragments continually reshape the listener’s perception of duration. In your accompanying text you write that “time can be matter too,” capable of being shattered into milliseconds and recomposed beyond conventional rhythm. Could you talk about how this idea operates in practice? At what point does editing become composition, and how do you know when a piece has reached its final form?
The parallel with sculpture, deliberately obvious, helps me explain by contrast a second concept that is actually quite distant from it. Granular synthesis allows me to treat time as if it were a material to be moulded, working at the temporal scale of microsound. A sound is split into tiny fragments (grains) lasting between roughly one and one hundred milliseconds. These grains can be layered together and played back in a different temporal order, at different speeds, volumes, and pitches. The resulting masses of grains expand and contract like countless droplets within a cloud of vapour.
To put it as simply as possible: from a single voice I can create the sound of a choir. It is an extremely complex technique and also the most radical form of sound processing, because it allows control over every aspect of sound, including time itself. A sound can be shattered into fragments only a few milliseconds long and then recomposed by reorganising those fragments into a different temporal order.
Returning to the sculptural metaphor, precision equalizers represent the via di levare—the process of removing material—while the grains, these temporal fragments that accumulate into layered sonic masses, embody the via di porre, building through addition.
A composition reaches its final form when I can hear within it the original idea that gave birth to it.
Your work has long explored memory, place, and the dialogue between environmental recordings and electronic transformation, yet Materia feels unusually tactile. Rather than evoking specific locations, the album seems concerned with the physical behaviour of sound itself—its grain, weight, porosity, and internal movement. Do you see this album as marking a shift in your artistic concerns, or is it another way of approaching the same questions that have occupied your work for many years?
Both perspectives are part of Materia. Everything grew out of ideas I have been developing over many years, yet at the same time I feel I pushed those reflections to their extreme, transforming them into something different. It is no coincidence that the compositions I am working on while answering this interview are very different, as though I no longer feel the need to add anything further to the discourse of Materia.
Speaking about the starting point, I feel that memory and place are both very present in Materia. There are a few quarries around my hometown, and seeing marble blocks ready to be shipped has always been very familiar to me. All the fields around my home are the exact colour of raw sienna, the pigment known in Italy as “terra di Siena” (“earth of Siena”). When the fields are ploughed or the soil is wet, the colour becomes almost identical to burnt sienna. This landscape has therefore always been part of my visual memory.
With this album I wanted to let the physicality of sound speak for itself, through a play of presence and absence; geometries in which the listener may also imagine what has been removed, or what might have happened had I removed even more.
Across your discography there is an extraordinary attention to detail, yet your music never feels clinically constructed. Even the most heavily processed sounds retain an organic quality, as though they possess their own internal life. You have described the interplay between organic and synthetic sound as central to your practice, but listening to Materia I often found myself wondering where that distinction actually begins to disappear. Do you still think in terms of field recordings, instruments, and electronics as separate categories, or have they become simply different states of the same sonic material?
This is a central aspect of my work, both aesthetically and philosophically. Although I no longer think of field recordings, instruments, and electronics as separate categories, the analysis of each individual component has become increasingly important in my practice. In other words, these are all sound sources that must be explored with great care, never taking for granted that I already know everything about them. This is an essential step that allows me to treat them as different states of the same sonic material, a description that resonates deeply with me.
(Gianmarco Del Re)
a closer listen 