Roberto Paci dalò
IN TWO WORLDS

The Kronos Quartet commissioned a string quartet from Italian composer Roberto Paci Dalò, whose multifarious activities include music/theatre projects, an opera, installations. radio art works, playing clarinet, ethnomusicological study and a film about Viennese actionist Hermann Nitsch. His wide ranging of collaborations have included encounters with British turntablist Philiup Jeck and American composer James Tenney. The mesostic John Cage dedicated to Dalò is printed on the CD cover. It locates Dalò in two worlds - nature and "the musical one". Here, electronic beams pulsate obsessively between stereo channels with occasional squelches of sonic blur. Elsewhere, bowed and pucked string shapes are woven into the signal's crisscrossing throb. Throughout, ostensibly electronic sounds are on the verge of disclosing their real origin in acoustic instrumentation or the natural environment - a common phenomenon in current composition, but Dalò holds his balance on that threshold exceptionally well. The closing fade is unadulterated birdsong.

Julian Cowley, The Wire, June 2004