Dance music is an outdoor thing for Donato Dozzy. You never get the sense that his music is taking place inside the club: This is a music of rivers, swamps, open ocean. The Italian producer’s 2012 masterpiece Voices From the Lake, with Neel, was conceived for a set at Japan’s mountainside Labyrinth festival, and the music seemed designed to burble from the very environment, as if created by the chirping of crickets and the rustling of birds in the underbrush. Everything has a rhythm, it seemed to say. Dozzy’s solo albums tend toward focused explorations of a single style, sound, or instrument. Hearing him coax the ghost of the club from a traditional Mediterranean mouth harp or the voice of collaborator Anna Caragnano, one suspects he’d be perfectly happy as a hunter-gatherer, bashing out a rhythm on a skin drum and calling it techno.
Dozzy’s new album Magda is less constrained than most of his work, and if these six long tracks stick to a fairly consistent palette of sequencer patterns surrounded by suggestive whispers and peaty squishings, there is tremendous variation within those core elements. Behemoths like “Le Chaser” and “Santa Cunegonda” coexist naturally with more ambient cuts like “Franca,” each one teasing the other. On “Le Chaser,” which sprawls over the entirety of Side B, his machines seem to have been left in the sun too long; Dozzy subtly detunes the signal so it sounds worn and faded, an ancient artifact from a time long before the invention of techno or even synthesizers. Basslines are a luxury, he’s as coy with his kick drums as ever, and when we hear a consistent 4/4 pulse it’s often startling to realize we haven’t heard a bass drum for a long time.
Dozzy has a DJ’s knack for sequencing, always creating subtle setups and payoffs that proceed almost imperceptibly. Because the sequenced synths are mixed so loudly compared to everything else, it’s easy to miss what’s happening in the margins, and you may not notice the addition of a new element until it’s been going strong for two or three minutes. Things that feel almost like hooks emerge imperceptibly from the primordial soup, like the drone on opener “Velluto” that eventually yields to a graceful melody that arcs up and up, or the frantic synth pattern on “Le Chaser” that suggests Carl Craig’s hair-raising remix of Junior Boys’ “Like a Child.” The album requires a few listens to really sink in: first to take it all in, and then to blot out what’s happening in the foreground and pay attention to the details.
Magda is Dozzy’s richest and most complete full-length statement in some time, eschewing the narrow focus of much of his solo work in order to highlight his strengths as a producer. Yet I wonder what Magda would have sounded like had he allowed even more sprawl, indulging runtimes that stretched past the polite nine-minute mark and into the dreaded double digits. “Santa Cunegonda” gains a lot from its extended ambient coda, in which the album’s meanest beat dissolves into a moonlit clearing of distant shakers and ghostly choirs; a few more moments like those might have helped the record feel a bit vaster and more immersive. There is a bit at the end of the title track where everything drops away except an incredible hollow chiming sound, which splinters into a million pieces of delay and becomes a beautiful drone—then suddenly fades out. I wanted to live in that fleeting moment for another 10 minutes.
