Alessandro Cortini has announced a brand new album, VOLUME MASSIMO - his first for Mute -out on 27 September 2019 on vinyl, CD and digitally, alongside a series of dates including the album premiere at Berlin’s Atonal festival and a London performance at the Barbican.

Listen to the first track, ‘Amore Amaro’, here: https://youtu.be/MVJC--9Swuk

Alessandro Cortini’s music casts the listener into an intricately rendered vortex of emotive dynamics, where he expertly maximises the boundaries of contemporary electronic music, both in his solo work and as a member of Nine Inch Nails. The new album, Volume Massimo, combines his fondness for melody with the rigour of experimental practice and strikes a balance between analogue composition and cathartic dissonance into a momentous continuation of the aching electronics that he’s renowned for.

Following on from 2017’s acclaimed album Avanti, which after a headline performance at Berlin Atonal 2016 took in a series of lauded live audio-visual performances structured around an intimate presentation from his family’s private film archive, Volume Massimo picks up directly from the previous album—the whisper of their voices slip to the surface on the album’s opener, ‘Amore Amaro’, rendering an echo of the previous release, a coda detached and adrift.

From here, Volume Massimo takes flight, journeying into a meditative process that gently twists time and memory in its wake with a deftly arranged ensemble of synthesizers saturated with sonic artefacts. Often the foreground is luscious, and hints at Cortini’s pop sensibilities, as the background takes us down a vast melancholic maze. Perhaps surprisingly, his latest work is interspersed with guitar motifs that act as a subtle punctuation for the oneiric landscapes that shimmer before us. ‘Batticuore’ is an exquisite and dizzying carousel that folds some of Cortini’s bolder guitar work into a glorious pop epic, while ‘La Storia’ ascends the same heights via a different route, pitch-shifting and layering a synthetic lead with a finely tuned noisescape before giving way to the mournful grind of ‘Sabbia’. Presented with richly saturated imagery by Emilie Elizabeth and Raki Fernandez, Volume Massimo is a work as confident as it is tender, as shown on its cover.

Never falling prey to needless elaboration or digression, Cortini composes with a determined will to take what is felt through music as a map for life’s journey. It is in this sense that Volume Massimo departs from a conceptual hierarchy and aims for the heart with a minimalist’s arrow.

VOLUME MASSIMO TRACKLISTING
AMORE AMARO
LET GO
AMARO AMORE
BATTICUORE
MOMENTI
LA STORIA
SABBIA
DORMI

ALESSANDRO CORTINI LIVE
30 Aug - Berlin DE - Atonal
8 Sep - Białystok PL - Up to Date Festival
14 Sep - Tilburg, NL - Draaimolen
22 Sep - Tokyo, JP - TBA
28 Sep - Ljubljana SI - Sonica
19 Oct - London UK - Barbican
20 Oct - Madrid ES - LEV Matadero
21 Oct - Athens GR - St Paul`s Sessions
25 Oct - Braga PT - Semibreve
6 Nov - Stockholm SE - Slaktkyrkan
8 Nov - Barcelona ES - Mira Digital Arts Festival
30 Nov - Copenhagen DK - KoncertKirken
6 Dec - Rome IT - Monk
7 Dec - Venice IT - Argo 16
11 Dec - Brussels BE - Bozar Electronic Series
11 April - Bruges BE – Concertgebouw

RECENT DISCOGRAPHY
IMMEDIATE HORIZON – with Lawrence English (2018, Important Records)
AVANTI (2017, Point of Departure Recordings)
ALESSANDRO CORTINI AND MERZBOW (2017, Important Records)
FORSE (2015, Important Records)
RISVEGLIO (2015, Hospital Productions)

PRE-ORDER - https://smarturl.it/volumemassimo

YouTube link - https://youtu.be/MVJC--9Swuk