Review: Francesco Giannico - Litania

It took a while for me to identify why Litania uplifts me, and longer still to figure out how to articulate it. His streams of synthesiser are like rivers running between everything; the neural circuits of the sonic universe. It hits me during “Organic”: piano spills over the tremble of ceramic teacup, before stretching into astral fingers that generate audible, white noise sparks through friction with heavy clouds, while birdsong dances like a distant fire. Each sound becomes the echo of a previous action and a previous object – a ribbon of events unravelling through time, passing an ancient energy through crying babies, imaginary strings, car alarms, gaping metal gates. The world is a divine exhale. Giannico’s melodies – curvaceous, blown glass sculptures that run across the stereo space like caressing fingers, beatless and open – are the strands of interconnection between everything.

He introduces new sounds as though expelling them from a smoke machine. They rise and spread into the space, faint and unfixed; clean guitars in spoked slalom, synth chords trading places fluidly like shapes in a lava lamp, murmuring bass tones that ripple like a badly lain rug. With the exception of “Feroce”, which appears to me in nocturnal purple and witchcraft glow, the colours are pure summer time: gentle amber sunrise, ripe green leaf. I am a tourist of transitory pleasures; a gondola passenger through a Venice lit by prism dispersal, the water bubbling beneath roygbiv cycles. I step out of Litania and the cascade of sonic reaction continues, with every footstep creak the prelude to a clang or scrape elsewhere. It’s a wonderful feeling.