(2021) Marco Shuttle - Cobalt Desert Oasis


Review:
In a review of 2017’s Systhesma, Holly Dicker described how Marco Sartorelli, who releases music as Marco Shuttle, uses the album format as a way to convey “the transportive, mind-expanding properties of [his] music, which can take you to some far-out places.” On his third album, and debut for Jenny Slattery and Anthony Naples’ Incienso label, Cobalt Desert Oasis, the Italian producer takes this both literally and figuratively. The record is a globe-spanning travel itinerary touching upon Cuban and Haitian rhythms, Iranian drums and Mesoamerican rituals, but it also wanders into worlds hitherto unknown. Sartorelli uses his hypnotic techno templates to craft electronic universes that undulate in and out of foggy existence. The album’s notes say that the music was meant to conjure some parallel universe utopia, and there is a sense of awe and wonder in the arpeggio of “4Dimensional Soundwaves” and the breathless melody that emerges from the loping percussion lines in “Into Thin Air.” Sartorelli’s choice of hand drums instead of four-on-the-floor rhythms that infuses the album with shimmers of optimism. On “Danza De Los Voladores,” we start with a kick drum trying to find its footing, but it dissolves in the liquid swirl of layered hand drums, a series of bird calls, and pan pipes. He pulls a similar trick on “Acrobat,” this time placing freeform drum rolls over a dembow swing that glides under robotic mating calls. But, as most theorists (and creators) of utopia know, one person’s paradise is another’s dystopia. Just take a look at the record’s cover art. While that desert oasis shimmers with a deep and lustrous blue, the surrounding landscape gives off some major post-apocalypse vibes. We can also hear a looming dystopia on the record. “Winds of Cydonia” is a haunted ballad that becomes more claustrophobic as the minor key melody dominates the mix. “Il Serpente Cosmico” is almost as sinister, labyrinthine with its snake-like rattle slithering through a maze of synth bleeps. Both tracks are a throwback to Sartorelli’s established terrafirma. This is the guy, after all, that runs a label called Eerie. Regardless of where the songs land on the utopia-dystopia dialectic, they’re all remarkable for their lush yet precise and minimal sound design. Elissa Stolman once described Sartorelli’s production as “definitely meticulous.” The beatless “Polysolation,” for example, is just a short series of chords taken to their tipping point. Both “Tombak Healer” and “Bembe Bongo” are sparse drum tracks: in the former we hear Sartorelli going to town on the traditional Iranian hand drum while some synths swirl across the stereo, and in the latter he explores bembe rhythms with a bongo. These tracks are effective in their directness, showing us that Sartorelli can build his sonic sandcastles in the sky with just a few component parts. Speaking to >fabric in 2017, Sartorelli explained how techno, for him, is a medium rather than an end goal: “It’s just a way to make music through sound, rather than really being a ‘type’ of music. Club music involves entertainment, but the music itself has no boundaries. It has no boundaries: in its soul, or in where it can go.” Sartorelli has taken this boundaryless approach further than ever on Cobalt Desert Blue by toying with the fine line between the synthetic and the organic. In opener “AIA,” it’s hard to tell if those are drums or sped-up footsteps skittering beneath the chimes in the second half of the track. And by the time we hear the whooping and clapping at the end of “Danza De Los Voladores,” it recasts our experience of the song Was this actually just a field recording of a performance in Central Mexico that Sartorelli stumbled upon? It’s this blurring of boundaries—utopian-dystopian, organic-synthetic—that makes Cobalt Desert Blue such a lovely voyage across a world entirely of Saroterlli’s own design.





Track Listing:
1.AfA 03:10
2.Danza De Los Voladores 04:47
3.Through The Cobalt Desert 06:27
4.Il Serpente Cosmico 05:03
5.Tombak Healer 05:40
6.Acrobat 04:16
7.Winds Of Cydonia 04:46
8.Polyisolation 05:10
9.Into Thin Air 05:34 video
10.Bembe Bongo 05:28
11.4Dimensional Soundwaves 06:44


Media Report:
Genre: ambient, electronic
Country: Germany
Format: FLAC
Format/Info: Free Lossless Audio Codec, 16-bit PCM
Bit rate mode: Variable
Channel(s): 2 channels
Sampling rate: 44.1 KHz
Bit depth: 16 bits