Genre: Experimental / Minimal / Drone

Track Listing:

01 Non Impulse
02 Sound

Federico Barabino has a lot of musical experience behind him in many musical fields, from Samba through Jazz and finally – to minimal sound and on the other hand, noise music. "Ruido is not noise" is a two-tracks work of sound that is Performed with "Feedbacks, guitars and ruido", which means noise in English, thus giving this unreleased album a rather contradictory concept in a Rene Magritte kind of way. Is this noise, after all? Well, yes and no. The first track, Non impulse, is an almost impossibly minimal odyssey, beginning with absolute silence and slowly, SLOWLY, getting guitars and sounds to its body. "Non impulse" is delicate, and it is ceremonial, in an almost Zen kind of way, making only the minimal movements in order to stay alive and not fall down to mute. After ten minutes it becomes a little more alive. After thirteen minutes sharp, it explodes. As if letting go of every energy it had kept within itself for almost quarter of an hour. After such a surprising grab of attention, Barabino can allow himself to fall again into the almost autistic and hypnotic silence again, making sure we as a listeners are finally listening.

With its cinematic properties and minimal composition, Barabino lets his music sink into the sub-conscious rather than force an active listening, at least in the first track. Even when put on maximum volume, it takes many minutes before you are 100% involved in the music. But you are already there with your feelings, by the subliminal hints that were there all along. "Sound" arrives with a completely different agenda, droning static with shifting frequencies that cannot but leave me wondering if I am listening to the absolute negative of the first track, where silence is replaced but an endless feedbacks and buzzes. Is this noise? Well, Federico Barabino was right. This Ruido is not noise, most of the time, but a constant and meditative pulse of sound. Nineteen minutes into "Sound", the feedback grows into stellar proportions for a while. And I am sitting and thinking about the absurd notion that, even with this shift into harsher noise, "Sound", while more interesting without any doubt, is much more static than "Non impulse" , which was a dynamic shift of sounds beneath the silence that engulfed it.

"Ruido is not noise" Is not a fun album in any way. It requires patience and stamina in order to be able to absorb these two extremes one after the other. A very interesting conflict between two works that may have achieved different interpretation inside a different context, but now are working together. An interesting work that invites to explore more about this artist.