The Infinite Ladder: 2Blue Reworks

Description

The Infinite Ladder: 2Blue Reworks | ^{DJ Rocca}

Video Credit: Rizosfera

Luca ‘DJ Rocca’ Roccatagliati is a producer, musician, and DJ. He began producing in the late ’90s, working on drum & bass and breakbeat singles as Maffia Soundsystem at the eponymous legendary club in Italy, Maffia Illicit Music Club, where he was the resident DJ. He has created, along with others, the following groups: Ajello, 2Blue, Obsolete Capitalism, Crimea X.

Over the course of his career, DJ Rocca has collaborated with Howie B, Pressure Drop, Zed Bias, Dimitri From Paris, Mark Stewart, Adi Newton, Daniele Baldelli, and Jazzanova, producing singles, remixes, and albums for some of the world’s top record labels, including Sonar Kollektiv, Gomma, Compost, Skint, Hell Yeah, and !K7. With the award-winning jazz musician Franco D’Andrea, he formed the Electric Tree Project, a contemporary music trio blending jazz and electronics. They released a double album in April 2016 on Parco Della Musica Records (the album of the month for Musica Jazz magazine in June 2016). The collaboration with this internationally acclaimed jazz artist continued with an octet and a couple of albums titled “Intervals I” and “Intervals II”, recorded live at the Auditorium Parco della Musica in Rome, concluding in 2022 with the triple album duo “Franco D’Andrea meets DJ Rocca“.

He has just released with Rizosfera’s NUKFM label “The Infinite Ladder: 2Blue Reworks” (NUKFM 018), an electronic album with cinematic and futuristic tones, traversing soundtracks and ambient-breaks. It hovers in a sonic paradise between Ennio Morricone and Tipper.

For artists Luca Roccatagliati and Enrico Marani, as well as for Rizosfera-NUKFM, this is an occasion to celebrate that legendary avant-garde group known as 2Blue. They were among the very first to merge poetry, electronics, architecture, and minimalism-drone.

Their two albums from 2003, “Light Transmission” and “Fattore Sonoro“, still shine today with an enduring dark light, far removed from trends and fluctuations, illuminating our mental and psychic landscapes with a pristine purity. Finally, the compilation of the ‘Infinite Ladder‘ is not only a mature reworking of obscure musical material but also a way to pay homage to the legendary existential and artistic experience of the Maffia Illicit Music Club, of which 2Blue were one of the countless luminous and ineffable galaxies.

“The Infinite Ladder / 2Blue Reworks” is then to be considered as the third milestone in a twenty-year trilogy of audio fantasy suspended between minimalism, the science of breakbeat, pictorial vision, cinema and poetronics. As Andrea Camilleri wrote, it makes us perceive the vibrations within and around us, allowing us to both accurately convey the truth of our experience and approach life in a creative manner.

Video Credit: Rizosfera

REVIEWS ::

ROCKERILLA (ALDO CHIMENTI) :: “DJ Rocca, the stage name of Luca Roccatagliati, is a creator of sonic holograms, whose sinuous forms are enigmas of electronic bodies floating in the air like radio frequencies of coded digits intercepted in the cosmos. For The Infinite Ladder, the artist officiates an immersive cinematic reworking of the 2Blue sound, investing it with renewed charm and dreamlike breath. A labyrinth of tentacular black holes, acoustic lemmas, and theorems whose undulating nature escapes the laws of gravity and astral silence. Seven instrumentals suspended in an alien spacetime dimension, like spirals of imaginary stairs ascending to the spheres of the unknown or descending into the dark vertigo of infinity. SIDEREAL MALIA.”

BLOW UP (PAOLO BERTONI) :: “As DJ Rocca, in addition to collaborations with Daniele Baldelli and Dimitri From Paris, last year released a triple CD with the renowned jazz musician Franco D’Andrea, Luca Roccatagliati had already released a solo album, “Isole,” in 2019. “The Infinite Ladder,” the title is that of the photograph by Ian Simmonds on the digipack cover, takes inspiration from the experience with Enrico Marani (Samora/Spectral Unit) as 2Blue, who in the first half of the ’00s had signed “Fattore sonoro,” a translation into sounds of Andrea Chiesi’s paintings, and “Light Transmission.” The reworking is as free as it is radical, and although there is the subtitle ‘2Blue Reworks,’ there is nothing of the rhythmic component that characterized especially the second record (Light Transmission). The entire work unfolds in a groove, as it is defined, ‘disambient,’ with individual pieces that are ideally baptized moving with a decade-long rhythm. 1984 was also in the tracklist of “Light Transmission,” starting from 1974, where, between the dreamlike and sci-fi haziness, reverberating sounds in delay bounce in an immobile air, reaching 2034, specifically the episode with the most evident futuristic trait. In today’s 1984, in the substance of ambient plot, cinematic horror unease is not spared, 1994 is captivating, with minimal dub refractions and melodic hints clinging to vast spatiality, in 2004 an isolationist fixedness seems to accompany a drifting spaceship in a post-apocalyptic scenario, expanding in 2014 to touch the requiem, with contemporaneity represented by 2024 painted instead more abstract and elusive.”