Gigi Masin: Movement

40 years after his now classic debut, the Italian ambient maestro releases a new long-form work

Back in 1986, Gigi Masin’s debut album Wind wasn’t widely distributed outside of a small, local experimental music scene.

The Italian ambient composer had already given up on making music professionally when his career was suddenly revived in the 2010s.

At over 60 years of age, Masin finally quit his day job – since then, he’s been releasing acclaimed albums and working on film and TV scores. His newest long-form solo work Movement is out today.

Like many people, I first encountered Gigi Masin’s work through the archival reissues on the brilliant Dutch independent label Music From Memory, especially the 2014 compilation Talk To The Sea.

One of the first releases on the new label founded by Abel Nagengast, Tako Reyenga and the late Jamie Tiller, it eventually led to a resurgence of Masin’s stalled career.

In 2015, Music From Memory followed the compilation up with Clouds, an album of mostly improvised studio jams by the trio Gaussian Curve.

This was a newly formed group of Gigi Masin, ambient guitarist Jonny Nash and the outsider house producer “Young” Marco Sterk. It was Tako Reyenga who first brought the trio together for a weekend in Amsterdam.

“In two and a half days we recorded the first album”, Gigi remembers. “One of the most pleasant and easy experiences I remember.”

My favorite tune on this gorgeous record was called “Broken Clouds”, a rework of Masin’s 1989 song “Clouds”, which had already been used and remixed by Berlin post-rockers To Rococo Rot for “Die Dinge des Lebens” (“The Things of Life”) on their seminal 1999 album The Amateur View.

Some people with notoriously good taste in music had apparently discovered the song as well, as “Clouds” had also been sampled by Björk and Nujabes.

“I have heard many very good versions”, Gigi says when I ask him about his favorite sample flip of his most famous composition, “but I must admit that I was struck by the version made by Otto Taimela and Olli Aarni, a breath not to be forgotten.”

Later in 2015, Music From Memory finally reissued the full version of Wind. Self-released in 1986, it was exclusively sold and given away at small concerts at the time, with many leftover copies later destroyed by a flood in Masin’s house.

The album remained a well-kept secret for decades, appreciated only in a tiny bubble of nerdy collectors – to which the founders of Music From Memory luckily belonged.

To learn that the Italian ambient maestro had released his early work to a largely indifferent public at the time baffled me. This was such breathtakingly beautiful music, for sure there must have been an audience for it in a time when labels like Windham Hill were flooding the market with acoustic New Age records, many of them of lesser compositional finesse and musical quality?

Today, Wind is widely regarded as a lost ambient classic, but its creator isn’t even so sure about this genre tag. At the time of recording it, Masin knew Brian Eno only as the keyboard player from Roxy Music; when asked what he was listening to back then, he mentions songwriters and musicians such as John Martyn, Nick Drake and John Coltrane – and playing loads of Motown soul tapes in the car.

“I thought I was paying homage to jazz”, he tells me about his main influences for Wind. “A lot of it was improvised. There were no scores. I was just exploring sounds that came from the heart. I certainly had no idea of creating an ‘ambient’ project, I didn’t know it existed at that time.”

“We live in a world that runs, runs, runs – but speed is sometimes [just] a way of hiding the emptiness in the things around us.” (Gigi Masin)

Even if Wind didn’t land commercially, Masin would go on to release another album in 1989, a collaboration with Charles Hayward of This Heat – this one included the original version of “Clouds”. It didn’t really go anywhere either though.

By the time that the global collector scene rediscovered his music two and a half decades later, he’d long since moved on from his ambitions, working as a postal manager and living life as a regular family man in his native Venice.

Gigi Masin had kept writing music as a hobby, working for small theatre productions and local poetry readings, but when Music From Memory approached him with the request to release a compilation in the early 2010s, his 1980s records were virtually forgotten.

Talk To The Sea changed everything – that lauded compilation of his work led to a renewed interest in Masin’s melancholic compositions.

It was a different music world now, with the 1980s revival in full effect and the ambient boom just around the corner. Obscure old records were suddenly gaining traction on streaming services because some of their tracks were included in playlists for background and focus music catering to people working on their laptops in open-plan offices, or decompressing from their stressful environments.

Masin quit his postal manager job in 2017 to focus solely on music, and in 2020, he released the solo album Calypso. Three years later, he followed it up with the celebrated collaborative LP Dolphin with jazz luminaries Greg Foat and Moses Boyd.

Now Sacred Bones releases Gigi Masin’s newest long-form solo work Movement, a double album of electronic compositions too upbeat and rhythmic to be called ambient, and too romantic and melodic to be called techno.

“Masin strived to make ambient music for movement”, the press text says, “not in the standard dance music sense, but ‘dynamic music, with a beating heart full of love’.”

Movement indeed lands somewhere halfway between Carl Craig and Manuel Göttsching – but with a distinct Mediterranean sensibility. The album consists mainly of long, immersive tunes, and most of them feature massive, reverbed drums. Beatless ambient music isn’t for Gigi Masin anymore, he admits.

When I ask him about the production process, his answers turn slightly towards the esoteric, but in essence, the record seems to be based on loops, drones and samples of his own studio experiments with synthesizers and other instruments.

“My way of working resembles the use of reel recorders, like in the good old days. It’s like putting a few pieces of fabric together to create a bigger and better fabric”, he says. “I let myself be captured by the sound, by the emotions I feel, by the vision of what I am creating and that appears to me, without me being able to do anything but marvel at how much beauty is hidden in the human soul.”

“Music is my favorite language, a [form of] magic that has very few remedies for our hearts in love”, he continues. “It is in the depths of our soul that we should look for that light that gives life to poetry.”

Asked what type of art has been inspiring him lately, he starts enthusiastically reminiscing about a recent trip to Japan, “a place of peace and beauty, from where I like to bring home old books and drawings, which speak of distant places and voices”, going on about getting “lost looking at the dark waters of the Pacific Ocean, waiting for it to tell me about even more distant islands one day”, and of “lying on the grass in one of Tokyo’s magnificent parks, [looking] at the clouds.”

“We live in a world that runs, runs, runs”, Gigi Masin says when asked about the need for making yet another album of calm, introspective music. “But speed is sometimes [just] a way of hiding the emptiness in the things around us.”

Gigi Masin’s new album Movement is out now.

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