Satoyama - Magic Forest (2019)

The Satoyamas are a quartet from Ivrea formed by trumpeter Luca Benedetto, guitarist Christian Russano, bassist Marco Bellafiore and drummer Gabriele Luttino. Magic Forest is their third album and, despite being fundamentally an instrumental record (with the exception of the presence of a voice that lists data in Dry Land), it is characterized by an ecological sensibility that makes each song be attributed an environmental theme to each song. , from pollution to desertification, from water wars to global warming and so on. A praiseworthy intent that here is combined with equally interesting music, certainly of jazz ancestry, but then in the reality of much more difficult cataloging. What is striking from the very first listening is the care with which all the tracks have been arranged, with the trumpet almost always responsible for the melodic side, but with all the other instruments capable of taking the stage in no time at all and always equally fundamental in the definition of these music. The fiat filaments that, between percussion and electronics, open the album in Plastic Whale slip between the radiohead rhythmic scans of One Part Per Million, before letting go to the melancholy and iridescent scores, augmented by a choir in the final, by Aral. The rhythmic drive of Melting Point acts as an appropriate backdrop for the dialogue between trumpet and guitar, which here lights up with psychedelic flashes. Not alien to post-rock logics (feel yourself Leave, with a lot of world watermark), the Satoyama hit the mark both in the slower and more circumspect pieces (Sovation, the titte-track), and in the more iridescent and moving ones (the beautiful melody folk of Dry Land).