Ricardo Mandolini

Ricardo Mandolini was born in Buenos Aires, 1950. He came to Europe to study at Köln’s Musikhochschule in 1977, then in various European countries and is now a teacher living in France. This LP was the first to be issued on Edition RZ, launched by Berliner curator and art critic Robert Zank in 1982 to document the local Inventionen Festival – with figures like Luigi Nono, Pierre Schaffer/INA-GRM, Mario Bertoncini, Canadian electroacoutic group Sondes, etc. Mandolini’s agenda for electro-acoustic music is more or less the same as Monoton for dub: ‘der Ökonomie der Materialien’, ie: rarefied and self-restrained compositions. Mandolini indeed reduces electroacoustic music to its vital skeleton (the fishbone of music, so to speak) but never forgets structure, dramatization and the evocative power of well chosen sounds. The 4 electronic works included here were created in various European electroacoustic studios between 1979-1981. They’re all based on a few sound sources, usually 2 only. ‘Estallido Breve’, for instance, is build on an increasingly accelarating electronic sound over a slow synthetic percussion rumble, the composition consisting of the articulation of both with occasional additional sounds for drama. ‘Juego De Marionetas’ comprises musique concrete and synthesizer sounds for an evocation of a puppet game where your imagination is left figuring out the games at play. Pressing quality is unbelivably good, arguably one of the most impressive piece of vynil engineering I have ever heard, with virtually nonexistent background noise.