hypersongs

Roberto Musci

The Milan composer and field-recordist who, with Giovanni Venosta, made Water Messages on Desert Sand (1987), a sampler record built from travels in Africa and Asia.

Travel as method

Roberto Musci was born in Milan on March 27, 1956, and works as a composer, multi-instrumentalist and sound artist. His own site describes a path that began with travel: from 1974 to 1985 he moved through Africa, India, the Near East and the Far East, studying local music, making field recordings and collecting instruments, and those years became the basis of his musical language. He plays saxophone, guitar, sampler, keyboards, Tibetan bells and suling, and has made music for film, video, theatre and dance, and live scores for silent cinema. In an interview on his site he put it plainly: his music is a travel story without anthropological or musicological pretensions, just a story.

His long partnership is with Giovanni Venosta, born in Udine in 1961 and mainly a film composer. The Musci and Venosta pairing began around Venosta's own Olympic Signals, dated 1984 by one writer and 1985 by another. Their collaborators over the years, per Musci's site, include Chris Cutler, Jon Rose, David Moss, Steve Piccolo, Suzanne Ciani, Elliott Sharp, Keith Tippett and the Third Ear Band.

The records

MusicBrainz lists The Loa of Music (1984), Water Messages on Desert Sand (1987), Urban and Tribal Portraits (1988), the compilation Messages and Portraits (1990), A Noise, a Sound (1992), Losing the Orthodox Path (1997) and the soundtrack Steel Water Light (2001). In 1998 Musci, Venosta and Chris Cutler scored Carl Dreyer's silent film Vampyr live in Milan; the music came out in 2015 as the two-disc Vampyr and Other Stories on Recommended Records, and the group went on to improvise to other silent films. Squidco described the score as a mixture of acoustic and electronic resources in tableaux as stark as the movie itself.

Music From Memory's 2016 double LP Tower of Silence, compiled by Abel Nagengast, Jamie Tiller and Tako Reyenga and beginning with the 1984 Loa of Music sessions, introduced the work to a new audience, and was repressed in 2024. Messages and Portraits was reissued on Bandcamp in July 2018, remastered at Lord Baltimore Recording Studio. Later releases are Melanesia (December 18, 2020), Goodbye Monsters (October 25, 2024, sold through Light in the Attic) and the Cargo Cult EP (November 22, 2024). Since about 2019 he has also worked in crypto art with a technique he calls Audiopainting, which links video and sound in real time. One profile described him as a singular artist overlooked by most English-language tastemakers.

Albums

  • Water Messages on Desert Sand 1987 · Recommended Records

    Musci and Venosta's sampler album, catalog RR C28, reissued on vinyl by ReR Megacorp around 2020.

Songs

  • Water Music Water Messages on Desert Sand · 1987

    The second track on side A of Water Messages on Desert Sand, about two minutes long.

Sources

  1. Roberto Musci, Roberto Musci
  2. Roberto Musci, In Sheep's Clothing
  3. Vampyr and Other Stories, Squidco
  4. Roberto Musci discography, MusicBrainz