Engaged in a new solo adventure, Giancarlo Tossani brings to Auand a work that is both a challenge and a game of mirrors: Strange Spy, to be released on 2019, June 7th only on digital platforms.
As the musician himself explains, “Strange Spy is the anagram of G.T. Synapser, the band with which for years, mainly, I propose my musical ideas. We could therefore consider this strange, bizarre spy a sort of alter ego. An unusual foreigner who in an anti-romantic musical perspective dialogues with the expedients of music technology and menu resources, sometimes dealing with “Notes that are not mine”, to paraphrase the title of the book by Emmanuel Carrère”.
After three albums with Synapser, which had made the band one of the most prolific with the Auand Records brand, with these tracks Tossani reveals a completely different approach. A little with the intention of practicing with appliances and software that today dominate the scene, a bit to try to tame the machine with creative elements that come out of the flaws of the technology itself, partly in search of the possibilities offered by circuits and binary systems. With patience and curiosity, its purpose is to put the less appealing aspect of man-machine dialogue in the foreground: not perfection and linearity, but the unexpected. The unforeseen circumstances in turn become a starting point for improvisation. “It is what generally characterizes a good part of my production – the pianist adds – usually with good human partners and here instead with a partner who does not have a human face but extremely helpful and complacent”. But a creative like Tossani could never have omitted the human component: the game also includes real compositions, and pieces with a significant part of writing. To make the exchange between human and digital even more vivid.