Novalia – D’improvviso
From Novalia – Sabir
Released on Materiali Sonori, 1990, Italy

Beginning like a RZA-friendly loop (you should watch Ghost Dog again if this doesn’t ring a bell) and ending like an epic Pink Floyd-esque instrumental, Novalia‘s D’improvviso  incorporates many elements that make it sound lovable to our ears. In between, the tune is a heavily new-age influenced song involving abstract tribal singing, pan flutes, trance-inducing drumming & more…

For once the musicians on this new age-to-ambient tune don’t come from the world of Italian jazz fusion, they rather claim to be part of an Italian Folk scene, though it doesn’t make any doubt that they’ve been listening to heavy prog-rock, a lot, for their music is much more epic than any folk album ever recorded.

It may seem like a minor point than we’re making here, however Novalia‘s second album shows us that this « electronic » music (which is not exactly « ambient« , « experimental« , etc.), which seemed to appear at the end of the 1980’s and which prefigures the explosion of the  « downtempo » and « chill-out » musical scenes has much more many different backgrounds than we first thought (considering them mainly as inheritors of Brian Eno‘s ambient music and of electronic experimentations in jazz fusion…), and folk music is one them…