Colloquio - Io E L'Altro

Much like a score or the soundtrack for composing of David Lynch’s Eraserhead or the short-lived TV cult classic series, Twin Peaks, Colloquio’s Io e L’Altro (The Self and the Other) was recorded back in 1995 on cassette and the sounds came from the different personalities that before and after the attacks and now it is finally re-mastered this year. There is a lot of spoken word poetry that Gianni Pedretti does on each of the compositions and bizarre yet twisted instrumentation's that he plays throughout the entire album and its almost that you are inside the mind of a person locked up in the mental institution and seeing what is going on inside their mind.

At times, there are moments that reminded me of David Bowie’s Outside-era, Klaus Schulze, The Residents, later-era of Tangerine Dream (late '70s), Vangelis' score to Blade Runner, and Kraftwerk rolled up into one and you can imagine Gianni listening to those different types of the electronic sound of that period to get the perfect view of the different version of the person’s self. And the result is the touches of the Avant-Electronic ominous sounds at times futuristic and bits of new age/atmospheric sounds that Gianni brings to the keyboards and electronic drum kit.

There are sounds that have and ideas of; tapping your toes and get into the groove, midnight sounds of mourning featuring a keyboard sax in the wee small hours of the morning, ominous/sinister environment backgrounds, underwater scenery to find a hidden world. And bits of Trip-Hop flowing in different directions, roaring Moog’s, robotic voices, haywire effects from the instruments that at times comes out of nowhere from the Synthesizer’s, and Pedretti’s spoken dialogue help out the disturbing situations that creates intensity and variation movements as if the world that the listener is noticing, is not what they are expecting inside the person’s mind.

What Gianni does is creating different random moments of the sounds and visions in structures. And there at times is in the styles of the Krautrock genre from the ‘70s. This really just took me by surprise after listening to this album seven times now, Colloquio has opened my eyes on the views of infinite universes between time and space and he knows the score and the spoken-word poetry very well.

I’ll admit, Io E L’Altro, is not an easy album to listen to from start to finish. And while the album was released nineteen years later, it is ahead of its time and it is such a mysterious, disturbing, and at times ambient, this is something that might be worth checking out. So, again as I’ve mentioned in the introduction, if you love bands/artists like; Klaus Schulze, Kraftwerk, the Outside-era of David Bowie, David Lynch, and bits of The Residents, then Colloquio’s music is for you. Just be prepare to expect the unexpected of Io E L’Altro.