Dialoghi Del Presente (Vinyl)

Luciano Cilio was born in Naples, Italy, in 1950. He studied music and architecture and, in the late ’60s, collaborated with local artist Alan Sorrenti, American expat Shawn Phillips and various avant-garde theater groups. A virtuoso guitarist and self-taught composer, Cilio released only one LP before his untimely death at the age of 33.

Dialoghi Del Presente (1977) is a work like no other, one that sounds both ancient and ahead of its time. Produced by Renato Marengo, it features a series of muted tableaux for strings, woodwinds, guitar, chorus, piano and percussion. Cilio carves out a space where subtle, repetitive phrases yield—almost imperceptibly—to breathtaking silence.

As Jim O’Rourke writes, “These recordings sound as if they were to please no one but himself; they feel selfcontained, introspective, and determined ... You can feel in the music a sort of necessity that can be rarely found, like in This Heat’s debut or Nick Drake’s Pink Moon.”