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-IV album 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 Forse trilogy - a series of droning ambient albums that coaxing complex human emotions out of an electronic patchwork. 2017’s surging Avanti LP 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 Massimo serves 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 Massimo in 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.