On the occasion of the release of “Loneliness, Desire and Revenge” Antonio Ciarletta wrote: “talking about Maurizio Abate is difficult because his music is enough in itself, it really doesn't need to be told”. Eleven years have passed and things are still like this. Confronting the sound shaped by the Milanese composer is an experiential fact, difficult to translate exhaustively into words.
This is demonstrated once again by “Sacre Stanze”, a long-gestating work conceived as a set of songs designed to be refined by the skilled arranging work of Marco Giudici. A process started in 2019, which has finally come to fruition today. An album that has become fully choral thanks to the contribution to the writing and/or interpretation given by a large group of quality musicians including Francesca Stella Riva (Satan Is My Brother), Valeria Sturba and Alberto Boccardi.
The over ten minutes of “La via del poet” – opening track – elegantly and without any hesitation condense the entire sound universe contained in the album. There are the carefully plucked strings to accommodate an electroacoustic substrate that is anything but banal, the timbral research underlying Abate's practice, the intersection with the vocal abstractions of Agnese Banti and Francesca Saracino, the dialogue with the trombone. All this generates a graceful flow between primitivism and ambient exploration, a plot that rises, stops and starts again elsewhere without creating caesuras. Immersive, powerful in its emotional impact.
An elegiac journey made of amazement and slight restlessness, made enigmatic by the modulations of Valeria Sturba's theremin (“Interludio”), potentially infinite in the reiterated arpeggios of Adriano Sangineto's Celtic harp (“Locus Numine”). A proceeding that veers towards pure experimentation activated by the comparison with Boccardi (“Eyes closed to see”) and becomes solitary only in the atmospheric suspension of “Nuvolario”.
Betraying the premise, too many words have been spent here. In reality, what remains to be said is that “Sacred Rooms” is a place of listening that requires silence, full concentration. Every drop, pause, resonance has an exact space that deserves to be fully grasped. All you have to do is close your eyes and abandon yourself to the magic of sound.
07/21/2026
Daniel D`Amico for SANREMO.FM
