Vito Ricci has composed some 80-odd pieces over the last 36 years: among them are string partitas written for Kronos Quartet; harmolodic studies inspired by his former teacher Ornette Coleman; a work sampling the sound of Japanese cicadas; and a microtonal composition for bassoon, two Theremins, and something called wrench guitar. You can get a sense of the circles Ricci has inhabited from a 1982 compilation on which he features alongside John Lurie, Peter Blegvad, Arto Lindsay, Christian Marclay, Martin Bisi, and Spalding Gray, among other Downtown N.Y. fixtures. If you don't pay close attention to New York's independent theater and new-music scenes, you may never have heard of Ricci, but he is a cult figure to some. An Amsterdam label that specializes in reissues of overlooked electronic musicians, like the Italian ambient outsider Gigi Masin and the Balearic oddball Joan Bibiloni, named itself after Ricci's 1985 album Music From Memory. (The LP's fans are a dedicated bunch: a batch of deadstock copies recently sold out at $85 a pop.) Now, Music From Memory is paying back the debt with a collection of Ricci's work.
Most of it is drawn from the 1980s, rescued from tapes made for theater works by playwrights like Matthew Maguire, Jeffrey M. Jones, and Susan Mosakowski. There are plangent synthesizers and gently pealing guitars; there are chiming echoes of classical minimalism and even synthetic strings descended from the vernacular heritage of Charles Ives. "Hollywood" sounds every bit like the incidental music its title would suggest, with its limpid synth pads and ersatz jazz keyboards; the slap-bass-infused "Dub It" doesn't have much to do with reggae, though it's certainly indicative of how what we might call "rainforest noir" ruled cinematic imaginations in the '80s.
As electronic music goes, it's a hard-to-place sound, lacking in the usual stylistic signifiers and now-canonical instruments. (The album notes detail a gear list of mostly forgotten devices like the Octave Plateau Voyetra 8 synthesizer, E-mu Proteus sound module, and Yamaha RX11 drum machine.) The music here sometimes brings to mind Craig Leon's Nommos and the early '80s recordings of the Seattle ambient musician K. Leimer. It shares, at least in part, their technology—long-since outmoded synthesizers, unvarnished drum machines, springy delay that wreathes the music with a hint of fizz—and their aesthetics, a mixture of proto-ambient, late-night television soundtracks, and homebrewed avant-gardism. Both of those artists released electronic music that sounded completely otherworldly in the '80s, and both, like Ricci, have recently been rediscovered, via reissues like this one.
In that sense, the compilation says as much about what listeners find value in now as it does the lasting value of the music itself. Today, sounds that even five years ago might have seemed unfashionable suddenly sound fresh. That's not to take away from Ricci's accomplishments: much of I Was Crossing a Bridge is wonderful stuff, even the incidental bits. One of the highlights is "Commie Stories (Part 9)", one of a pair of sketches written for Susan Mosakowski's play of the same name. Less than two minutes long, it consists of a single arpeggio played—by hand, from the sound of it—through a delay unit, evoking a burbling water fountain; it's easy to imagine it as the foundation for a transporting techno jam on a label like L.I.E.S. or The Trilogy Tapes. And if "Inferno (Part 1)", an eight-and-a-half-minute fugue for shuddering percussion and chirping analog delay, were released on either of those labels today, passed off as a new production from a bedroom studio in Los Angeles or Berlin, nobody would bat an eye. That the opening track, "The Ship Was Sailing", sounds like a companion piece to Maxmillion Dunbar's "Woo", from the Future Times co-founder's 2013 album House of Woo, speaks to the uncanny timeliness of Ricci's work. It's as though gardens planted in vacant lots in the '80s, long left untended, were finally being harvested, and their heirloom seeds put back into circulation.
Two songs on the anthology date from the past few years, and they are, perhaps appropriately, among the album's most musically and conceptually developed selections. "Deep Felt Music", nearly 13 minutes long, evokes both Durutti Column and Tony Conrad in its flickering hints of plucked guitar and its shimmering drones, while "Dox E Koo", for solo voice and delay, stakes out a position somewhere between Meredith Monk and the haunting tones of Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares. The very finest piece is "Riverflow (Electronic)". Plucked acoustic guitar cuts against coolly bowed lines and dissolves into a galaxy of delay and faint percussion; dissonant and arrhythmic, it could almost be mistaken for a Gastr Del Sol outtake. No date is given in the album notes, so I don't know when it was recorded. There's a different version on YouTube, dated 1970, but the album version, sparklier and in much higher fidelity, is almost certainly a more recent recording. But perhaps it doesn't really matter when it was made. The best material on this compilation sounds like it stands outside of time entirely. Unlike linear time, this river flows both ways.
