Potter Natalizia Zen: Magari LP

Colin Potter (Nurse With Wound), Alessio Natalizia (Not Waving), and Guido Zen re-group for a new album of sensuous kosmische synths and complex rhythms that comes highly recommended if yr into anything from Craig Leon to Robert Aiki Aubrey Lowe, from Alessandro Cortini to Basic Channel. The trio’s pulsing, twanging, expansive ‘Magari’ was recorded between 2018-2020 and adapts their style to the unique Afro-Latin lilt of Brazilian music with central use of the Berimbau; a single-stringed percussion instrument commonly associated with the elegant martial art/dance of Capoeira, brought home from travels in South America. Combined with their almost fleshly arps and Guitar pedal-generated computer voices, the results are wonderfully wide-eyed, embracing bouts of motorik rhythm beside vertiginous noise wormholes and mystic tone poems that speak to a cumulative experience spanning decades spent hunting for life between the wires. Like their first album, much of the recording here took place remotely or in pairs, and rarely with all three present, before the parts were mixed down at Colin Potter's studio in Leytonstone. In its journey between the intricate meters and perpendicular vectors of ‘Too Much Traffic’, and their mesh of curdled tones with their phone recordings of a manic preacher in Camberwell on ‘Saved’, they variously recall Craig Leon’s alien invocations of Dogon folk tales as much as the heady dissonance of Alessandro Cortini; producing outstanding pieces of tangibly haptic substance in ‘Sergio’ and infectiously tip-of-tongue Berimbau twang on ‘Gennaio’, and for good measure, something like Phil Collins’ ‘In The Air Tonight’ gently losing the plot after a healthy dose of Ayahuasca in ‘Fill’, while ‘Ancora’ sounds like Basic Channel scoring Herzog’s Aguirre. Yeah,. All the good things.