Fabio Orsi
Find Electronica
2007

Never judge an album by its title. If you were about to judge the title anyway, you would probably be put off by the three-part album of Fabio Orsi who is residing in the Provincia di Taranto, Italy. Electronica is a term of the late 90's, still in use, but despised in a similar fashion than Techno. And what is there to find on this album anyway? After all, you surely know the drill and discovered quite a lot of interesting electronic tracks yourself. Despite an unfortunate choice of the title, the three parts that form one 50-minute long track offer an appealing mixture of genres. This is clear cut Ambient with a Folk undertone and a tiny dosis of New Age which means that it is captivating and assured of a good future.

Find Electronica (Part 1) starts with a brightly colored synth string consisting of two notes and an additional quavering string. A folk guitar is plucking in accordance. Things get intense after six minutes when the formerly bright synth string is morphed into a dark, intensely bubbling one-note superiority that gradually swallows the folk guitar. By now, the track has become a drone song that consists of a monotonous synth of hypnotic quality and rhythmical reverberated claps before the string finally changes one last time to a brighter 4-note theme that pushes the bubbling one-note synth further away. Find Electronica (Part 2) is totally different and introduces rhythmical peals, slamming bursts and electronic bird noises. The mellow synths of Part 1 are now exchanged for a melancholic melody that slightly shifts to a more sanguine mood with an added folk guitar and tubular bells. This individual part is then replaced the folk guitar which plays a 4-note loop and is more dominant on here than on any other part of the album. Part 2 ends with yet another total shift, now consisting of a Folk Rock melody instrumented on the folk guitar and an electronic piano, making this the weakest part of the album as its shifts are too arbitrary and alienating, even more so when the following part is taken into account: Find Electronica (Part 3) readopts the closing theme of Part 1 but adds a new element in the middle of the track, namely a pervading dark synth that doesn't vanish until the very end where it is faded out for good. Part 3 is by and large surprisingly similar to Part 1, in fact so much that I ask myself why it didn't replace the actual Part 2.

Fabio Orsi's Find Electronica has a nice touch and it works, although not in the way it is intended to work: as an album, it circumvents the expectations it sets by denominating the tracks as parts and by adding two almost too similar parts – Find Electronica (Part 1) and Find Electronica (Part 3) – which are again intersected by a part that sounds so entirely different from anything on the album that I cannot consider the term part as an appropriate one. However, on a per-song basis, Find Electronica shines, especially Part 1 which is a bright rendition that turns into a drone tune and overcomes the drone with brightness and thus becomes full circle. The drone effects themselves are lush and hypnotic, definitely not insipid, let alone annoying. Part 3, as stated before, picks up on Part 1, but here the mechanic sounding drone effect doesn't work as well as on Part 1, making this the slightly weaker part. Part 2 is the most fragile track on here with lots of room for bird noises and a folk guitar that sounds more intense when played in these surroundings. Since I am preferring multilayered Ambient music, this part doesn't do too much for me, but this is my problem which you probably won't understand or care about. To sum things up: In my opinion, Find Electronica fails as an album as its three parts are either way too similar or too diverse and thus diminish the overall theme. However, the songs work when they are being isolated, as their beauty shines through. Orsi is without a doubt a skilfull musician, but here we have the rare case of an Ambient album where the parts are better than their sum.

Ambient Review 011: Fabio Orsi – Find Electronica (2007). Originally published on Dec. 18, 2011 at AmbientExotica.com.