Coluccino: Atto on Another Timbre

Let’s be honest about what we’re dealing with here. Osvaldo Coluccino’s Atto — released on the reliably provocative British label Another Timbre — contains no musical instruments, no electronic processing, no melody, no harmony, no discernible rhythm, and no structural logic that a listener could follow with any confidence. What it does contain is sound. Deliberately, uncompromisingly, sometimes maddeningly: sound.

That distinction matters more than it might seem.

The temptation, when confronted with something this radical, is to reach for the nearest theoretical life raft — Cage, Schaeffer, Fluxus, the whole post-war European avant-garde that made a long and occasionally glorious career out of questioning what music actually is. Coluccino knows that tradition. His earlier work, including recordings misleadingly labeled “string quartets,” suggests a composer who has thought seriously about where the boundaries are and has decided that crossing them isn’t enough — you have to pretend they were never there. That’s a posture with a certain intellectual integrity to it, even if the results here are, to put it plainly, not music.

Not music. The phrase will offend some readers, and I understand why. Cage taught us — or tried to — that any organized attention to sound is a musical act. Schaeffer built musique concrète on the principle that a disc of a train could be as compositionally valid as a Bach fugue. Coluccino himself pushes back against that lineage, insisting that his acoustic objects produce sounds that cannot be identified with particular sources, that he is escaping what he calls “the cages of our cultural habits.” The pun on Cage seems almost too convenient.

But here’s what you actually hear: something that sounds like breath across a bottle mouth, something that suggests gravel shifting in a container, intervals of near-silence punctuated by what might be polystyrene dragged across a textured surface, or a metal lid — thin gauge, probably aluminum — settling against something harder. The mind reaches, inevitably, for objects. Coluccino wants it not to. The gap between his intention and his result is where this whole enterprise becomes interesting and also where it quietly collapses.

Because the guess-the-object game is genuinely irresistible. Is that a frying pan? A saucepan lid rattled against tile? At one point something strongly suggests small animals moving through ductwork — not metaphorically, but acoustically, with scratching and irregular weight-shifts that carry unmistakable biological implication. Coluccino would say you’re wrong to hear it that way. Fine. But the ear doesn’t take instructions.

Some will find this richly rewarding. I am skeptical of that claim — not because experimental sound art is inherently worthless, but because Atto provides so few handholds that even the committed listener, the one who sat through late Feldman or early Nono with genuine engagement, may find the attention wandering before the first extended passage is done. Attention needs something to hold onto, even if that something is as minimal as a pitch relationship or a recurring texture. Here, almost nothing recurs. Almost nothing develops. The silences between events feel less like compositional choices than like the time it takes Coluccino to pick up the next object.

Another Timbre, to its credit, makes no false promises. The label’s sparse documentation — just a terse note that Coluccino uses “acoustic objects but no musical instruments or electronic manipulation” — is at least honest. More context lives on the label’s website, in a lengthy interview that rewards the determined reader. But a digipak that ships without even a booklet feels less like artistic restraint than like an admission that the work cannot easily be explained on its own terms.

Coluccino is not interested in your approval. That much is obvious, and in certain contexts it’s even admirable — the history of new music is full of artists who mistook popularity for corruption and paid the price in obscurity that was, sometimes, entirely deserved. But there is a difference between difficulty and vacancy. Webern is difficult. Late Feldman is difficult. Atto is not difficult in the same way. It is difficult in the way that a blank wall is difficult — you can contemplate it, project onto it, find meanings in its texture — but the wall hasn’t done very much to earn your contemplation.

Worth hearing once, if you’re curious about where the outer edges of this particular tradition have gotten to. Worth returning to? That’s a harder case to make, and nobody here is making it convincingly.