Roberto Laneri's Two Views of the Amazon composed in 1981 and 1984 [by request]

 

This is an experimental album which requires a bit of patience to listen through.  From the blurb on the back:

"My formal training in music has been in the classical European tradition, but I've had more than passing interests in quite a few different musical styles from various times and places in the world.  All these influences have somehow found their way into my memory banks and my music.
Professionally, I've worked for more than a dozen years in the field of traditional avant-garde, as a composer and wind player...

Side 1 includes two pieces from a cycle called 'Songs of Middle Space' a space in my mind where all kinds of music as well as times and places mix and interact with one another.  Sometimes strange encounters result.  In a sense this music is designed to trigger echoes and memories on many levels...

Side 2 is overtone music, a result of my involvement with extended vocal techniques since 1972.  For 7 years the overtone vision was embodied in Prima Materia, the group I founded in California and later moved to Rome...

Two Views of the Amazon is realized with purely vocal means both in the tape and the live part.  The tape part is composed of multi-track tape loops -- only one track is slowed down by almost an octave, to bring about the very high overtones which form the whale-like chant which opens the piece and keeps recurring..."

--Roberto Laneri

"An ancient magic ritual in the rainforest.  The distant echo of flowing voices, as mysterious as bird songs in the night, the moon's reflection among the palm trees, secret incomprehensible words learned on the banks of a totemic pond, wild animal rapturously listening in the night.

And then, elegant, exotic, cool and sentimental songs, softly whispered by wind-like voices, fleeting like the voices one sometimes hears in dreams...

These musics [sic] inhabit the border lines of the world -- the last city before the desert, skyscrapers reflecting the palms of the jungle-- they reach toward the shadows and bring back their fascination in nebulous, evanescent textures, where from the dizzy blossoming of timbres from time to time the purest and most haunting melodies arise, telling of ancient myths and faraway places.

Voices rising from abysmal depths, with the fascination of the depths..."

Daring to cross the ultimate limits of the universe of sound, they passionately reach the vast spaces of memory, realigning its polychromous chips into a unique, fascinating texture where through strange and mysterious ways the future coincides with the ancient, the tribal with the electronic, the modern with the primitive.

Here, in the infinite combination game [his emphasis] in which their secret life is pulsing, it is possible to decode the very core of our time."

--Gaetano Cappelli

Lee Colbert is the singer on track A2, "Circular Crossroads," a phenomenal track that starts with a piano obbligato pattern and builds up slowly with Roberto Laneri on sax and vocals moving in and out of the mixture, later a synthesizer echoes the piano pattern but seemingly out of tune.

Roberto is also credited with (barely recognizable) vocals on the second side.