Giuseppe Doronzo - Futuro Ancestrale (2024) Hi-Res

Temporal and spatial tyrannies, cultural conventions and deep-rooted idioms, all dissolve in a beguiling trans-dimensional flux during the four post-Gurdjieffian spirituals to be found on Futuro Ancestrale, an album documenting the exhilaratingly ambitious first encounter of three master musical mages operating at the apex of their creativity.
Recorded during their debut performance at Amsterdam’s Bimhuis in June 2022, it finds baritone saxophonist, and bandleader, Giuseppe Doronzo, guitarist Andy Moor and drummer Frank Rosaly summoning-up a succession of gateways between epochs and topographies, the trio infiltrating diverse ancient cultures, charging traditional Ethiopian, Lesotho and Persian music with snarly punkish brio and granular post-rock textures, employing unorthodox approaches to modern instruments and contemporary takes to those from a bygone age.
Moor’s electrified barbwire jags, grousing thrum and spidery pitch-warped contortions are instantly recognisable from his singular contributions to outfits such as Dog Faced Hermans, The Ex and Lean Left, as well as boundary-pushing collaborations with, among others, Thurston Moore, Anne-James Chaton and John Butcher. On ‘Neptune’ he inaugurates a festering static hum prickling with mounting tension, festooning Rosaly’s incessant crystalline chimes and coruscating snare-skin scrapes in bristling electro-shock, signalling in otherworldly semaphore as Doronzo’s sax howls like a banshee’s hexing curse.
Momentarily casting aside his fire-breathing horn for ney-anbān bagpipes during ‘Magma’, Doronzo huffs up a peevish insectoid swarm, exorcising the ghosts of South Iranian custom in an ebbtide of ersatz synth-buzz, as Rosaly’s flaying floor-tom hustle and scattergun rim-shot ordinance combine with Moor’s grouchy discordance, the trio merging microtonal and mediative in a surreal series of Raymond Roussel-style wasteland seances.
Futuro Ancestrale is full of delightfully confounding riddles and pregnant with unanswerable mysteries, owing much to the rule-breaking experiments of Argentine author, Julio Cortázar, and particularly his celebrated 1963 novel, Hopscotch (which lends its name to one of this album’s more pugnacious tracks). Like that book, this phenomenal trio’s music invites multiple meanings and interpretations, yielding a courageous stream-of-consciousness approach to storytelling brokering pathways to trance-like states. But whereas Cortazár deliberately deals in the expendable and surplus, everything on Futuro Ancestrale feels indispensable, not a moment wasted, nor a single tone or timbre superfluous.