with time, we learned to ask lessis the debut duo album of Italian, Milan-based experimental guitarist-sound artist (and prolific mastering engineer) Giuseppe Ielasi and Italian, Lisbon-based multi-instrumentalist-composer-scholar Riccardo Dillon Wanke, who plays here on the electric piano. Ielasi and Wanke first collaborated in the group Medves more than two decades ago, and Ielasi mastered Wanke’s recent album i (Mazagran, 2023).

The album was recorded at Ielasi’s studio in Monza in Italy, in a two-day session in October 2023, following a successful performance in Lisbon. It features two extended, reductionist improvisations that were edited over the following months. These pieces highlight Ielasi and Wanke’s focus on patient and careful sculpting of space, literally, with space – or silence – between the notes, instead of just occupying the space. The pieces reflect Ielaisi’s austere and subtle approach, almost as if he is adapting Feldman-esque minimalist aesthetics to the electric guitar, and Wanke’s interest in static music and extreme microtonality (he teaches Acoustic, Psychoacoustic of Music and Sound, and Artistic Practices at the Department of Musicology of NOVA University Lisbon). They play with great attention to detail, with gentle doses of reverb,  complementing and counterpointing each other’s playing.

These abstract and sparse yet highly immersive and lush pieces are surprisingly harmonious, sounding as if suspending the sensibility of time and using space as a tactile entity. These fragile, poetic aesthetics of time and space demand an active listening to every nuance, allowing silence to be vocal, and the air to sing.

Eyal Hareuveni

Giuseppe Ielasi (electric guitar), Riccardo Dillon Wanke (electric piano)