A smog Museum – The Poetic of Space and Time: Molise who looks to the post -rock :: Ondarock reviews

Behind the moniker A Smog Museum is hidden Nazario Graziano, a multifaceted Molisano artist, now room in the Marche, who in addition to being a test musician is also an established illustrator and collaborator. In this capacity he has in fact created works for some of the most important Italian and international magazines as well as for multiple brands of absolute importance. For this reason, the covers of its albums could not be exempt from taking care, always creating images with a great visual impact such as the one, particularly successful, which accompanies this work.

Before examining his current solo project, his debuts must be mentioned as guitarist and founder of the band The noise of the paper flower, with which in the early 2000s he gave birth to three very interesting post-rock works.
Coming to this album, the second after “Untitled 01” of 2022, Graziano proves to have treasured his experience in the group, creating a precious mix of electronics and post-rock with different contaminations that lap trip-hop.
The collage technique seems to have also been used in musical production since the plots are full of overdents such as in the opening piece of “Holy Mountain/Samshititi”, second single that anticipated the exit of the album, which begins slow and smoky between docili beat and calm Drum Machine To then increase in intensity in a crescendo of carried out and digital reverberations.

Compared to the first album and the beginning with the noise of the paper flower, ours has abandoned the guitar to devote itself completely to a more electronic sound, through a dosed use of analog and digital devices.
Worthy of noteworthy “Crystal Forest”, with its soft keyboards and its hypnotic trend in vague Four Tet style, and “Drama Movies for the Cosmos” with its typically post-rock incede enhanced by synthetic stretches.
Following an interlocutory piece from the coordinates very close to “Fittier Happier” of Radiohead, contained in “Ok Computer”, or “I'm a Walkman, I Love You” in which a robotic voice sets out on a sound carpet with cosmic atmospheres.
One of the greatest qualities of the disc is to be able to merge in an exemplary way nostalgic sounds to an electronic glacial: this is particularly evident in the final triptych, which starts with the melancholy “Things We Lost in Eclipse”, characterized by aseptic breakbeat which are established on a very evocative ethereal base followed by the absolute summit of the album, “Voodoo Milk Radio”, in which a synthetic base with particularly obscure tones anticipates an orchestral ending that laces the free jazz. To close, the “Analog Dreamscape” ethereal, with its impalpable and twilight melodies that refer to some work of The Album Leaf.
The live performances of Smog Museum also deserve a nod, made even more engaging by a series of suggestive video projections.

Paraphrasing the aforementioned Radioheads and one of their most famous pieces, “Everything It's in the right place”, here everything seems to be in the right place, all row smoothly, and if this is an undoubtedly positive aspect, it is at the same time a small limit: it would perhaps have benefited a few moments of greater creative freedom, a stroke capable of being able to get rid of the cards on the table. Net of this, however, “The Poetic of Space and Time” is a successful job that will be able to do the lovers of post-rock and a certain type of electronic music happy, the most reflective and visionary.

26/04/2025