"The vision of Giuseppe Ielasi is remarkable in its depth and simplicity. On "Aix", he creates meticulous compositions while using samples of acoustic instruments, creating an effect that resembles the Cologne minimalism of Wolfgang Voigt. These pieces stem from his technique of microediting, in which he precisely arranges very short samples from all types of sources-percussion, piano, mouth harp, rhythmic rubbing, and even zippers create hypnotic beats that are constructed like electronic pieces. Keyboards play a familiar role here, climbing over the top of Ielasi's plodding beats to form a sort of main event in many of the pieces. He also incorporates other acoustic instruments in familiar form, including trumpet blasts, Spanish guitars, bowed bass, and other accoutrements, to sculpt his dark atmospheres. The tunes are short-typically around three minutes-but they quickly lock into intriguing grooves that are both tense and mellow. Ielasi has garnered a lot of attention for the conceptual strength of releases like "Tools" (12K), in which he used a single household object on each track (a rubber band, a cardboard box) to create intricate beats meant to be used by electronic musicians. But "Aix" moves him onto another level, with compositions that stand fully on their own, as moody and stark as they are imaginative. He's developing an exciting synthesis of methods that are currently being explored, especially in Europe-the combination of electronic structures with freer ones, the manipulation of acoustic instruments to resemble electronic sounds, the increasingly subtle and integral use of digital editing. "Aix" affirms his place at the vanguard of this new electroacoustic minimalism, looking both back and infinitely forward. 10/10"

"Cor, this thing feels classy as soon as you get it in your mits. Nice card stock for both inner and outer sleeves, artwork that you could look at all day.. Just what you want when you've just got to have a fondle. It's not like the sounds aren't enough to keep your interest either, far from it in fact, their electro-acoustic improv cleverness kept short and to the point for the duration of the record. Exactly what the fella's process is I'm not sure, but it sounds as though he takes recordings of acoustic instruments and samples them into satisfying and frequently complex little grooves which take in a range of styles: some sound like looped West Coast cool jazz in their laid back smoothness, some of the more processed and abstract cuts are reminding us of To Rococco Rot and there's definitely more than a touch of Tortoise at their most experimental at various points. Nice one, like."

"As an improvising guitarist, Giuseppe Ielasi's nearest antecedents are electro-acoustic wranglers like Dean Roberts and Loren MazzaCane Connors, lateral thinkers who while embracing the instrument's indeterminate qualities -- from pickup noise to amplifier buzz and other sonic anomalies -- take particular care in constructing coherent musical structures from them. Ielasi, also a composer of electronic works that stretch found sounds through a veil of subtle digital processing, is equally concerned with the creation of site-specific works that incorporate instrumental gestures and real world, concr?te sources into a complex network of organized, spatialized sound. The two interests complement each other nicely on his 2009 album, Aix. All of the album's nine untitled tracks use rhythmic grids as a structuring motif for heavily randomized sound events, an idea that would appear not so far removed from the more experimental realms of techno, were it not for timbral qualities of the sounds being manipulated, and the total absence of a steady kick drum pulse. Indeed, nothing so much as a deflated 808 bass click drives anything along, the time-keeping implied instead by elliptical furrows of hand percussion cut along evenly spaced segments. The drier structuralist approach here is offset by more opulent melodic motifs and accents, as in the repeated piano figure and jew's harp of "Track 3." But the crux of Aix's post-improv, slo-mo techno appears to be an exploration of acoustic space. The sheer variety of complex instrumental textures (from percussive objects and acoustic drum sets to piano, trumpet, and guitar) set to an array of artificial and natural reverbs, echoes, and stereo imaging, and the subtlety and clarity to which they are deployed, separates this effort from similar records by legions of laptop-wielding experimentalists in the '00s. Aix is a highly recommended release for lovers of post-digital composition and adventurous minimal techno. "

"Italian electro-acoustic savant Giuseppe Ielasi first made a name for himself in the avant-garde community for his work inventive guitar work, but after switching over to American label 12k, he began to phase in a much wider array of instruments and objects, keeping them rooted in the ambience for which he had become known. The resulting release, August, was superficially appealing, but felt sorely lacking in spirit. On Aix, his second 12k release, Ielasi finds the essence that was lacking in August and uses it to animate a truly inspiring new work. A casual look at the track lengths is just one clue that a new sonic sheriff is in Ielasi's town. Since August, Ielasi has sneakily been lowering his track lengths from seven- to ten-minute miniseries to shorter, more bite-sized snacks. Here it seems that this tendency has reached its logical terminus, with only one track even cracking four minutes (though if this record is any indication of future results, I wouldn't mind if Ielasi becomes the Agoraphobic Nosebleed of electro-acoustic artists). While I certainly admire all of his earlier work (2003's epic Plans should be absolutely required listening for any electro-acoustic noodler or guitar experimentalist), I can't help but feel like Ielasi has found something he's been after (or should have been after) all along. Aix, named after its birthplace in the south of France, is a stuttering, fidgeting, mercurial, and ultimately coherent treasure. Ielasi's work with sound sources other than guitar has never been more sublime, as he hews meaningful relationships out of the raw, noninteracting racket of clanging metal, zippers, steam discharge, sproinging springs, and twanging wire. Many of these tracks begin with this type of general clatter, sounds floating around in nebulous formation, seemingly barely held together. Eventually, Ielasi's improvisational dexterity really kicks in, and everything seems to snap together into patchwork quilts of misty, soothing tones. Some of the tracks here are much in the vein of Ielasi's earlier work, retaining the airy yet linearly directed ambience of releases like Plans and 2006?s untitled/self-titled release on Häpna. The most interesting tracks, however, are the ones in which Ielasi is operating on the pseudo-theme of the album, hinted at by the fantastic cover artwork: grids. This is by far the most rhythmically concrete release Ielasi has produced, but never do we feel like his penchant for on-the-fly creation has been handicapped in any way by the superimposition of a more discernible structure. It's fascinating to hear how he molds ostensibly unrelated short samples and the aforementioned racket into methodologically elaborate and distinguishable patterns. The album is intelligent and challenging, but lacks the cold remoteness of August, and sometimes walks a fine line between the two. Occasionally one teeters on the brink of alienation from the shuffling digi-industrial beats, but the album never fails to entice us back in with its balmy undertones and undeniably hypnotizing patterns, as if the basic grids of our DNA are naturally drawn to like kinds. However, the album is not simply an exercise in conceptual diagramming; there are legitimate grooves in spots here, with pulsing bass and loopy sounds converted cleverly into beat makers. It occasionally feels like listening to a recording of a hyper-futuristic counterpart of the guy who plays upturned plastic pails in the subway. Ielasi has moved successfully from a purveyor of pure ambient drift to a much more diverse electro-acoustic renaissance man, spinning the entire sonic world around him into atypical, beautiful latticework webs. For an album that sounds like what I imagine to be dance music beamed back from millennia in the future, it manages to engage us on simultaneously more profound and more primal levels than almost any club-banging Euro-dance hits or indie electropop tunes can today. Even with that said, it feels like there is more to this album than our minds and bodies can even really comprehend at this point. Hopefully we'll be able to catch up someday, but for now I'm content with watching the pretty patterns."

"This is a really subtle record. I suppose that goes without saying if you are already familiar with Italian born minimalist composer Giuseppe Ielasi. For those that haven't heard much or anything by him, this is not music for the uninitiated. Ielasi walks a similar path along the same road as other new gen luminaries Christian Fennesz, Raphael Toral and Oren Ambarchi. And like those other artists, IeIasi creates challenging modern music that more often than not ignores - nay avoids - conventional structure and sentimentality. The music has a quiet passion about it too - something I might not have caught if it weren't for unusual late-night accidental experiment with my girlfriend. Without saying a word she got on top of me and after a few songs discovered my earbuds. She took one out to listen as we continued along; the album looped and it was a few minutes after 4am now, what an excellent ride. Damn I really need to get to bed earlier? It bares repeating - this is very subtle music, and yes one could also say very odd music. It is not the sort of thing you blast in your car, windows down during a summer day (that would be old Swervedriver, thank you very much). No, this is late-night music where you can relax and let it envelop you in it's unique world of found sounds, emerging and lost rhythms and of course ever present sonic white space - those patient moments between well timed piano notes and an occasional bass pluck. Quite excellent. I find it best to listen to most things on headphones; there really isn't any other way to catch all the subtleties a music really has to offer. Ielasi like the rest of his new gen brothers benefits significantly from this listening technique - even more so than something like the new Intrusion or Alps. Both of those release are excellent in their own right, but they do beat you over the head in a much more obvious way than Ielasi ever does. And so I have found myself being drawn to AIX more and more, especially late at night when the music has it's most dramatic and potent effect. Laying in bed during those late night hours - the hours of the wolf - reading the new Brian Greene string theory book, it's a perfect sonic compliment to that heady material. Just as Greene is expanding our laymen's knowledge of a universe built on infinite probably, so does Ielasi, who's music is as improbable and beautiful as anything else in this universe full of fading mysteries."

"A veteran composer based in the Milan area, Giuseppe Ielasi's background is in improvised music, but his recent work has shown him as much at ease in somewhat more premeditated compositional territory, creating site-specific soundscapes and even mucking about with ambient shades of minimal. Aix is Ielasi's "grid" album, a fact that's impossible to ignore, right down to the cover art. Its nine programmed mosaics are quite a departure from the gently rocking textures of his previous album for Taylor Deupree's 12k, 2007's August. Though they play as albums cut by the same artist, Aix's vertical architecture depends on repetition and combination where the widescreen August relied on duration and variation. Regardless of the gridded formula's prominence, the album's lasting personality and color come courtesy of Ielasi's taste for certain acoustic instruments, insulating the grid conceit from the cold. In particular, Ielasi has had a career-long preoccupation with sounds conjured from the guitar. His predilection for the strum and twang is in plain view on Aix, but Ielasi devotes his attentions to other instruments as well, sampling music created on the piano, trumpet, harp and all sorts of percussive phenomena. Additionally, Ielasi's sonic arsenal includes tricks picked up in places way down the block from the conservatory, incorporating synthesizers, field recording and cloudy post-production effects. The album opens with a handful of clipped sound snippets plotted graphically over an unhurried tick-tock of bass. Within two minutes, thankfully, a tight but melancholy loop of dusty keyboards blows in and softens the spare metronomic stiffness. With very little alteration of the ingredients, we're left with a laidback, surprisingly soulful groove that wouldn't sound out of place on a Prefuse 73 record. This more or less sets the tone for what follows: a collection of three- to four-minute vignettes that alternate between spare rhythms based on abrupt snatches of acoustic sounds and unabashed melodic prettiness rooted in jazz, pop, out-rock and chamber music. This covers a lot of terrain, each of the miniatures standing out as distinct from the album as a whole. The second track stutters with plucks and taps, but a pensive piano loop winds through the third track, sounding like something you'd expect to hear in one of Jay Electronica's Hollywood-film-score-sampling productions. By the fourth song, Ielasi is tunneling through Microstoria terrain, but on the fifth he's shifted to a bubblegum micro-funk accented with prolonged organ tones. And so it continues, brushing against new touchstones and genres with each track, but adhering to the stacked-samples blueprint and retaining a steady tone throughout. Though I wished at times for something a bit more peculiar, Aix is thirty minutes of lovely, evocative atmospherics. Decorative music crafted with an eye to concept and experimentation, it's intricate enough to seem almost descriptive, which seems natural for a composer so interested in site-specific music. Aix nestles into the background and doesn't demand attention, but won't be deterred as it gently steers to its very specific places. And they're very welcoming places."

" Back in Vital Weekly 632 we reviewed 'Stunt', the first 12" in a series of three by Giuseppe Ielasi. The next two 12"s we didn't see, so I don't know wether they were released. It might very well be the case that they weren't released, and that Ielasi uses the material here, as 'Aix' seems to be a continuation of the 'Stunt' 12". Again he uses small blocks of sound material, sampled from whatever source (acoustic objects, instruments, vinyl) and plays around with them. Nothing ever works out in a real groovy way, but that is exactly his point I think. But what he does works so wonderfully well. This sounds like the missing link between musique concrete and techno. Where the whole clicks 'n cuts movement tried to make beat oriented music with the residual sound material, 'Aix' is the true link. No residue material, but great warm sampled sounds, that make a groovy, even jazz like sound. Around that Ielasi waves warm small melodies. Nine pieces, all around three to four minutes (thusmaking the record the usual Ielasi length of around thirty minutes). A record that due time will be as important and ground breaking as the first SND releases, with whom Ielasi shares a similar interest: redefining dance music. Another highlight of the new year!"

"Italian electronic composer Giuseppe Ielasi themed this album around the idea of rhyhmic grids, something illustrated in a helpfully literal fashion by its artwork: the colourful, closely knit and highly organised construction provides a visual signifier for the sort of musical developments captured on the disc. Seldom do you hear an artist on the 12k roster working so explicitly and so pointedly with rhythm, but Ielasi does something quite remarkable with Aix (so-called because the album was made in Aix-en-Provence, incidentally): he's used all the tricks in his microsound arsenal to fashion warm, strangely jazzy 4/4 music from delicate conrete sound sources. The narrative unfolds according to Ielasi's largely improvisational sequencing skills, stacking up a wealth of location-based acousmatic events - forming beat patterns from the strangest of sampled noises. What makes all this so intriguing is the use of space; Aix feels like such an immersive, well poised experience beacuse it avoids cluttering, allowing you to gauge the depth and scale of Ielasi's digitally-assembled grid environments according to the interplay between booming low frequencies and the more microscopic, higher range timbres. The fifth piece, for instance, is sprinkled with close-up, brittle percussive gestures and spacious clatter emanating from the middle distance, and it's all pinned together by deep, rotund bass plunges that sound as if they've been snipped from a Farben 12". The spread of natural echo across the stereo field is another key ingredient here, and moving onto track eight, the gloomily reverberant clacks and shuffles start to sound like noises from the same empty construction site depicted on the sleeve, suggestive of space, and proportion. At times, the end result of all this electroacoustic toil might reasonably be described as 'techno concr?te', but inevitably any such soundbite fails to do this record justice - it's a far more musically rich experience than that, in no way enslaved by its own conceptual origins."

"Giuseppe Ielasi's Aix (the title alluding to its Aix-En-Provence recording locale) weighs in at a mere thirty-one minutes yet the Milan-based producer still manages to pack a wealth of sound into its nine untitled pieces. And not just the usual instrument sounds one might expect, such as guitar, bass, and piano, but an idiosyncratic array of micro-samples, unusual percussive noises, and synthetic textures. The tracks are typically grounded with irregular, lurching pulses and then augmented with a rich variety of sound fragments that Ielasi carefully weaves into ultra-detailed settings. There's both a structured quality to the music in its reliance on rhythmic grids?often jazz-like in feel despite their constructed character?and a loose feel in the mutating flow of sonic accents that scatter over the base elements, a contrast mirrored in the beautiful cover photo where a building under construction reveals a similar marriage of repeating structural form and unpredictable colour distribution. Just as the building reveals both an intricate level of detail and spaciousness in its unfinished form, so too does Aix balance sonic density and space in arrangements that teem with the incessant march of sounds and yet avoid feeling cluttered. Sonic details prove arresting in almost every piece: poured water sounds and creaking noises accompany the skeletal rhythmic lull in "01"; repeating piano sprinkles intensify the jazzy feel of "06"; angelic harp strums and muted horns appear amidst a heaving assemblage of knocks, snaps, and pitter-patter in "08"; and overlapping acoustic bass motifs and see-sawing organ tones combine for a somber exeunt in "09." Ielasi augments the tick-tock base in "02" with the bright ping of a single piano note, a zipper, sci-fi whorl, and other micro-sounds, all of them taking their respective places within the grid-like rhythm design. The downtempo lurch of "03" gives it an almost spectral character, its subtly swinging rhythm suggesting it would be a natural soundtrack to a detective drama's opening credit sequence. The burbling bass pulse and dense, almost dub-like mix Ielasi deploys in "05" even calls to mind the style of Vladislav Delay's Entain and Multila. A prototypical ?headphones? recording, Aix 's wealth of detail and activity offers a richly rewarding experience to the discerning listener. "

"After bowling over audiences with 2007's stellar August, Giuseppe Ielasi has returned with his latest work of art, Aix. Whereas Ielasi approached his medium in August with a more traditional, linear methodology, Aix witnesses a transposition of this technique, and now Ielasi layers his sound vertically. In this sense, Aix isn't an album about progression, but rather growth. Additionally, Ielasi restrains himself to short tracks (only one breaks four minutes), which prevents the music from becoming a wandering, pointless exercise; instead, the audience is given a snippet of how sound interacts in Ielasi's new environment and then we're moved right along. True to his legacy, Ielasi makes ear candy for the experimentally minded."

"Milanese guitarist and electronic musician Giuseppe Ielasi is best known for his languidly beautiful, yet painstakingly wrought drone poems. His finest releases ? 2003?s Plans (Sedimental) and 2007?s stunning August (12k) ? are set apart by Ielasi?s attention to the smallest of details in his sound sources, which are left largely untreated. Pieces seem to unfold out of the hypnotic ebb and flow of crackling field recordings, warmly linear guitar lines and burbling electronics. On first listen, Aix ? named for Aix-en-Provence, where the album was recorded ? appears to mark a shift, however subtle, in Ielasi?s solo work. The emphasis is more on rupture and rhythm, rather than on the soft, stream-of-consciousness flow that is Ielasi?s hallmark, but it?s still as immersive and atmospheric as ever. Ielasi constructed the nine untitled pieces that make up the album along the lattice points of a rhythmic grid, using chopped up samples and fragments of piano, drums, guitar, trumpet, vinyl and other less-easily decipherable sources as basic musical building blocks. In spite of its adherence to what would seem to be the grid?s rigid confines, from the first kerthumping downbeat and subsequent unspooling of "Untitled 01," Aix has a glorious, disorienting funkiness to it. Tracks have a loose-limbed swing that draws liberally from jazz and dance music while using the techniques of musique concr?te. Though the music is immediately engaging (think of Jan Jelinek?s early albums for a slightly more techno-inflected relative), it also reveals different facets of itself with every listen. Ielasi?s use of the grid allows him to layer his unusual array of sounds into extraordinary, interlacing patterns that shimmer and skitter across the breadth and depth of the stereo field. Once you focus in, it?s easy to immerse yourself in every fine, yet uncluttered detail, so that when the last off-kilter bass loop fades into the distance at the end of the lovely, and very melancholic, closing track, there?s a palpable sense of loss."

"Aix steers Giuseppe Ielasi well away from the refulgent romanticism he?s courted on past works. Ielasi no longer manipulates harmonic, timbral, and dynamic parameters with equal emphasis. Instead, he focusses on the material craftsmanship behind his lithe assemblages of micro-samples, percussion, and synthetic textures. The appeal of the disc is found in its tendency to find the poetic not in the ephemeral or indistinct, but the inert and everyday furniture of today?s carping cityscape?s. Ielasi utilizes elastic springs, zippers, winking bells and other miscellaneous objects one might find strewn across construction sites such as the one depicted on the albums cover. From these disparate sound sources, Ielasi weaves dense, surprisingly intricate, real-time sound collages that pull off the trick of inviting serious investigation while constantly teetering on the brink of instability. Ielasi handles the material with a strong, consistent sensibility, which enables these brief vignettes to retain a cool ease. As he shifts lightly from pieces of jittery disposition and fragile details, to toy-box charms, and close-up gurgles and bony kneed thumps that instinctively unwind like a kind of strange epiglottal sound poetry, all lined with the odd ripple or splash of melody, he maintains a continuous flow without faking up dramatic intensity. On headphones, it becomes a particularly engrossing, warm, even sensuous, sonic tableau."