“Senzatempo” is the second collaborative album from Ozmotic (Simone Bosco and Riccardo Giovinetto) and Fennesz and it is astoundingly beautiful. It’s easy to get lost in the sounds of this album, and from what Ozmotic have said about the recording process, it seems as if that was part of the aim. “Senzatempo” took shape partially during the initial days of the pandemic, and it was that inability to get together in person to play or record that allowed Ozmotic and Fennesz to generate ideas that matured slowly, over many months of discussion and consideration. “Senzatempo” means “timeless” or “without time” and in the discussion of the compositions, Ozmotic has talked about focusing on a feeling of time becoming borderless, dilating, expanding. All the individual tracks on “Senzatempo” share that feeling, a wash of sounds that appears eternal and inexhaustible, an ocean wave crashing onto a shore now, the same as it did thousands of years ago, the same as it will do thousands of years from now.
“Movements I & II” illustrates this really well. There’s a kind of smash audio cut into the track, where slowly sliding strings move alongside a bass drone and lightly chirping electronics. The strings are orchestral, yearning, cinematic, and are interrupted occasional by static scorches and very faint bird noise. There’s a more pronounced electronic pulse around the five-minute mark, when the track grows in volume and intensity and then shuts down completely (with the exception of the birdsong in the background). A thrilling break in the song, and then what sounds like a muted and mechanically plucked electric guitar enters—imagine something like a robot with a dozen hands strumming a guitar above the nut. Part II has more motion, with guitar washes, blasts of hydraulic percussion, it’s all more danceable, more choreographic, winding down again to the mechanically plucked guitar and another smash cut out of the track into silence.