The friendship between Irish musician James Strain (former member of the experimental rock band Supernormal Prophets, as well as author of albums under the name Auxiliary Phoenix) and Dario D'Alessandro of Homunculus Res has distant roots (2017), a collaboration born from a shared interest in the fate of the American art-prog band Rascal Reporters and sealed in the excellent album “The Strainge Case Of Steve”.
The Lunophone project (my memory goes back to an old Italian progressive band: Maxophone) is the result of an unusual long-distance correspondence based on file musical and exchanges of ideas. “Surroundings” was born partly for fun, but above all because of James Strain's increasingly burning passion for Canterbury music.
“Surroundings” is for both musicians the opportunity to test themselves with new languages. The producer and multi-instrumentalist James Strain comes from the American alternative rock scene, with an artistic path that has seen him intercept jazz, hip-hop and progressive-rock. For this further step towards the prog-Canterbury scene James has refined his approach with the keyboards, leaving the guitar a purely elaborative role in the composition phase. For his part, Dario D'Alessandro has toned down the more pop-prog ambitions of the original band, for a sound more robust and vibrant.
The first fruit of this collaboration has the task of opening the dance (“Lunaria”), two minutes where the vintage echo of the keyboards prevails. With only one song over five minutes, Lunophone give space to energetic pages balanced between jazz-rock and Rock in opposition (“Ametista”) and intercontinental fusions of prog and jazz-rock (“Aduantas”), showing off a harmonic, rhythmic and instrumental sample of high quality in the most audacious and adventurous “Dalbhdha”.
The duo also finds time and space for a suggestive love song (“Uchtog Mhoillithe”) that allows Dario to improvise as a modern Richard Sinclair, intoning a wordless melody (or gurgling?) set on the dynamic and loose variations on the prog-jazz theme created by James Strain. The delicious mix of prog, bossa nova and electrofolk in “Zuppa la sera” shines for its originality, an ambiguous and elusive song, full of real images and dreamlike phrases, a visionary and concrete world that in the end is the true meeting point between the two musicians.
Even though they are easily identifiable in their paternity, the twelve tracks of “Surroundings” testify to a continuous dialogue between two artistic worlds that often find a fusion so perfect as to deceive even the most attentive listener. “Cioch Charraige” and “Miglior vita” are exemplary in this sense: two tracks that further raise the general level of the album and promise interesting future developments. The adventure of Lunophone has just begun.
07/07/2024
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM