Lester Bangs, one of the most important musical journalists of all times, in his articles collected in “Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung” (1987) deplored the fact that rock music had begun intellectual and rockstar-centered, losing its original vocation to be a party for teenagers. For the American journalist rock was boring and self-referential, a product to offer to the masses. It’s a pity he died in 1982 (after a life full of excesses), he couldn’t testify how many times popular music has switched from his animal side to its intellectual one and back. Electronic music does not escape to this dynamic: from ambient to house and techno, from IDM to hardcore, it is always an alternation of intellectual and body attitude. But what happens when a musician puts together these two attitudes in a single work?
This is what you can find in Meteorum’s music. Leonardo Santi from Modena (Italy), grown up as a drummer but immediately fell in love with electronics, becoming an appreciated DJ. His sets are known as very rhythmic due to the drum set he uses to add a percussive depth. Besides his career as a DJ he becomes a producer, with the will to discover connections between different forms of electronic music. The way is to make the listener live an experience at different but interconnected levels, because we have simultaneously the need to perceive our body and our brain breathing together.
After a couple of singles with an accentuated techno table of sounds (“Madness” for example, deepens the research of low frequencies to make our body dance) Meteorum arrives at 2024 to his first album release, Liquid Forms (out for Diffuse Reality), a good synthesis of brain and body music. The magic atmosphere of “Nashuva” (the art of returning to life, to self, to dreams, to community, to hope) raises from the intersection of dreamy synth sounds and a powerful rhythmic section: like a trip toward a hidden civilization to discover a new spirituality. “Night Runner” is close to some IDM experiences: broken beats, deep basses and the explosion of a flurry of synthetic notes. Powerful, direct, sinuous. “Verde Orbita” represents the ambient side of Meteorum’s music, devoted to create an atmosphere mixed with the rhythmic attitude. Vibrations, accelerated heartbeats, the will to dance with eyes closed to image another reality. “Atrani” gives space to real drums to create a perception of presence in a dreamy composition, tense and reflective at the same time.
Liquid Forms is an interesting demonstration of how personal creativity can lead to new ways of living electronic music. With Meteorum we are in the field of expanding our ways to feel alive, thinking and moving: the infinite possibilities electronics give us are the tool, the rest is about human being.
