Alessandro Cortini^IT

Alessandro Cortini’s 1998 move to the United States from his home in Italy led to a flurry of collaborative motion - recording the iconic Ghosts I-IValbum as keyboardist for Nine Inch Nails, creating icy electro-pop with Ladytron, and serving as frontman for LA electronic group Modwheelmood.

Cortini’s solo work centres around the obscure and intricate Buchla Music Easel, creating the hazy, entrancing Forsetrilogy - a series of droning ambient albums that coaxing complex human emotions out of an electronic patchwork. 2017’s surging AvantiLP added a sense of personal history to Cortini’s discography, pulling inspiration from old Super 8 videos of sourced from his grandfather.

2019’s Volume Massimoserves as a culmination of Cortini’s output, blending fluid sounds with fraught ones. While the Italian producer has a deep education in rigorous experimental structure, Volume Massimo’s power is in its ability to discard sonic rules and frameworks, plunging experimentally between euphoria and devastation.

For MUTEK 2020, Cortini will perform 2019’s Volume Massimoin its entirety, fulfilling the one instruction he gave listeners when the album was released: “Play at a loud volume”. Backed by powerful audio-visual accompaniment, Cortini will perform a sonic patchwork spans beautifully sublime moments, only to drop into deep pits of ominous frazzled distortion. With a long-practiced skill of wrenching human emotion out of synthesized noise, Alessandro Cortini’s acclaimed electronic soundscapes need to be felt to be believed.

Alessandro Cortini wrenches human emotion out of synthesized noise. Using walls of analogue equipment to create an immersive ambient sound that’s both hopeful and ominous, his industrial compositions rise, crash, and subside. Performing 2019's Volume Massimolive in its entirety for his first MUTEK performance in Montréal, Cortini's sonic landscapes need to be felt to be believed.