"After the quickly sold out Ggràn cassette, released on Fragment Factory in 2016, we are very happy to welcome back the Italian sound artist Mauro Diciocia aka Torba for his 2nd contribution to the FF label catalogue. "Musique Inconcrète" is the follow-up to Musica Conventionale, released earlier this year on his own Edizioni Aaltra imprint, and marks the second installment in a trilogy of related recordings, informally named "Le Musiche". While being active in the field of contemporary sound art and noise music for more than a decade, Diciocia has produced a whole lot of mostly small run cassette releases. This LP is Torba's first and long overdue full-length album for the vinyl format.

While Diciocia's latest work is far from being composed in classical terms, the concept behind the album revolves around the idea of sketch or annotation. Or better still: The inconcrète. A semi-false (or semi-correct) french word, used to undermine the consistency of the french Musique Concrète tradition in a rather light-hearted manner. During the conception of this album, MD was strongly influenced by the work "Incompiuto - The Birth of a Style" by the Italian contemporary art collective Alterazioni Video. They loudly claim that Incompiuto - the unfinished - is the only Italian art style of some significance in the past 50 years: "The term 'incompiuto' refers to the architectural and infrastructural works whose construction has been halted, and which can be witnessed throughout the entire Italian peninsula. They are all publicly funded, and for a variety of reasons (design errors, political decisions, inaccurate cost estimates, contractors' bankruptcies, evident disregard of building regulations, the disappearance of funds, etc.) their construction has been interrupted, leaving behind a series of ruins in reverse." (Alterazioni Video)

Far from any reference to post-architecture or mafia-political controversy, the final output of "Musique Inconcrète" is a macro cut-up of sound-screens reorganized as quasi-organic narration: Fragments of unfinished compositions, roughly assembled according to a mere aesthetic criteria. Beyond the sporadic use of oscillators and a few inserts of other people's music manipulated on ¼-inch tape, the whole LP is made out of field recordings collected in the region of Salento in southern Italy, where Diciocia is currently living. All environmental sounds were captured with common consumer electronics (walkman and mobile phones) in order to give back the domestic feeling of an abandoned opera. Speaking of geography, the first track Lapjèdr Fòr is the only exception. Intended as an introduction to the whole narration, it testifies MD's emotional and non-linear journey back from Germany, where he spent about eight years, to Southern Italy: It contains a clashing mix of recordings made in Berlin and around the seaside of Torre Lapillo.

The pictures for the artwork of the album were taken by the photographer Gabriele Albergo, whose perpetual-in-progress project "Salento Death Valley - A Black Diary of the Most Beloved Italian Peninsula" aims to deconstruct the touristically idealized image of the region through the serial production of what he calls anti-postcards."-Fragment Factory

"The previous release by Mauro Diciocia, also known as Torba, was Musica Convenzionale (see Vital Weekly 1186), hardly conventional music and for his new one he has another wordplay with a music genre, Musique Inconcrete. I now learn this is the second part of a trilogy about "Le Musiche". The 'inconcrete' is not just a wordplay on 'musique concrete', but it also has to do with the incompleteness of the music. It is inspired by the art collective Alterazioni Video and refers to half-finished constructions that can be seen all over Italy. Unlike musique concrete composers, the music from Torba consists of unfinished pieces, roughly assembled, using splices of tape found on the floor and stuck back on. All the field recordings were made in Salento region in Southern Italy, and were all captured with a Walkman and mobile phones, which is an aesthetic choice to go for some of the lower forms of recording equipment. The press release also mentions field recordings Berlin, where Diciocia also lived (and somehow that seemed a contradiction). The cover lists six pieces for this LP, but I started playing it and lost any notion of a track here. Rather it is two side- long collages of sound, and like before there is a beautiful harshness in this music (even when I had the impression the pressing was a bit on the quiet side); a harshness that does not equal noise per se, and that is something I like. The whole notion of musique concrete not being a careful construction is something that is not new of course. Ever since the boys and girls in Industrial music started to think about sound collage, multi-track cassettes, they worked with the musique concrete techniques but with more volume. In that sense, Torba is in a great tradition. As to whether these pieces sound finished or not, I really can't say much about it. I would say they are finished, as they are carved into the grooves of this record, and no longer subject to change. In that way, they are finished, and for the listener, not privy to the process of making the music, it sounds finished. The slightly random approach of sounds dropping in and out add for me to that fine historical tradition of industrial music turning musique concrete. This is another release; I loved the first one I heard, and now this second is on par with that and IÕd say that Torba is a promising new name in this field."-Fran de Waard, Vital Weekly