Memory Noise is Fabio Servolo, and he works with synths, field recordings and his own sample archive. He landed on Ipologica by buying a second-hand Novation Peak from one of the label's founders. The sale started a conversation, demos followed, and the label heard an album in them. Ipologica has been going since 2006, and ran events and electronic music classes in Rome before it even pressed a record.
'Time Is A Dimension' runs to nine tracks and took a detour to get finished. Servolo packed his Turin studio into boxes partway through and left it that way for six months. He says the gap is what let him hear which pieces belonged together. His own Bandcamp holds earlier Memory Noise records, and n5MD has had him on a compilation.
The album starts with the title track. The piece opens with an ambient interlude before lilting keys enter the soundstage alongside a low-slung breakbeat and achingly beautiful pads. Not often an album’s opening track elicits tears from this weathered soul…
‘Present and Rust’ follows, its click and bass rhythm draped in washes of static and the siren song of Servolo’s distorted, swirling synthesizers. As the various elements granulate and corrode, then re-blossom out of the ether, we are reminded of how time past shows in everything present.
We travel to the ‘Left Side of the River’ next. The track is loaded with piano that arpeggiates gloriously, its dancing emulating the rushing of water. Elsewhere in the track, the echoing percussion replicates the sound of droplets, and IDM breakbeats evoke the sudden change of a current’s course.
‘Unfolding lines’ do just that in the next track. Over the course of the composition, layers of pads and synths encourage the sound to expand and evolve into something almost living and organic in feel. Something less linear, transcending time and moving into multiple dimensions.
Next, our mind feels the pull of ‘Gravity Thoughts’, which uses a vocal sample to haunting effect in the opening sequence. Soon it breaks out into echoing glass bells and bowls sitting among the percussion and spoken samples, their indecipherability drawing in memories that stay just out of grasp.
The glitchy, chopped keys and vinyl crackle of ‘An Easy Answer’ instil a further sense of homeliness and familiarity. The shortest track on the album, but it has plenty to engage the curious listener, with hidden samples sitting just out of earshot, unless you listen closely.
‘Reversed Directions’ is next, titled so quite obviously thanks (at least in part) to some of the samples, which are clearly presented in reverse. The production is once again dreamlike and beautiful. Wait for those breathy pads and kinetic percs to sync with the other elements at the two-minute crescendo, before the track really opens up.
Penultimate track ‘Places’ starts with a really nice pitch bent synth, while echoing yelps and chatter never quite manage to permeate time’s membrane and break out into reality, but then who would want to when enveloped in such sublime washes of visceral sound. Occasionally a ticking will reveal itself, perhaps signalling that time…our time… is almost over.
We close on ‘Elsewhere’, which combines digital rain with a dubby outbreak of magnificent bells. The finality is soothing and calming. Perhaps we are swapping our own time for another dimension now.
Ipologica is doing it on wax as well as digital. Both are over on Bandcamp. Go and buy it. We for one are very grateful that Servolo found the patience to finish such a stunning long player.
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