It’s a rare and bewildering thrill to encounter something as organically bizarre and entirely transportive as Koradan’s newest album, “Around the World…Music”. The Italian duo Alex Baccari and Marzia Di Cicco are dedicated acoustic alchemists. They build the very tools they play. Through their patented centerpiece, the “Koritas,” they have physically fused materials harvested from five different continents into a single resonating chamber. You can hear that massive geographic collision bleeding into every hollow strike and creeping drone. The entire project functions as a deliberate collapse of borders, weaving deeply entrenched ethnic traditions and modern soundscapes into an intimately shared human language.
The sheer sonic range here gave me whiplash, though in the most agreeable way possible. The opening rush of “Tanec Vetra” lays down a rapid, shimmering arithmetic of trills over a steady background pitch. It tightly anchors you to the earth before “Nuages” suddenly drags you by the collar across a desolate desert. That particular track carries a dark, echoing hum that genuinely raised the hair on my arms.
There is an absolute refusal to sit comfortably still on this record. Take “Hara.” It is completely unhinged. Frantic, highly aggressive strikes violently collide with field recordings of deep thunder and torrential rain. I found my pulse actually racing, caught up entirely in the stormy, high-stakes cinematic tension. Then comes the jarring pivot. “Trinithango” playfully ambushes you with bouncing polka rhythms and dancing scales, plunging you headfirst into the chaotic, laughing epicenter of a rural carnival. You never know what sonic room you are going to walk into next.
The emotional anchor of the record frequently relies on fluid collaboration. On “Tarab Cafe,” guest musician M. Viviana Marconi steps in to provide a sprawling, microtonal saxophone lead that glides elegantly above a rich harmonic drone. It is an intensely serene and spiritually resonant sequence that essentially commands the listener to pause and simply breathe. Compare that traditional peace to the nervous, repetitive avant-garde looping of “Akuko Ale” or the eerie, neoclassical dread embedded within the methodical arpeggios of “Gothic Clagan.”
By bridging such a wild mosaic of global styles, Baccari and Di Cicco force us to examine the profound connections underneath our localized human rituals. When the dissonant, wailing pitch-bends of “True Color” finally fade to black, the resulting silence feels heavy. Have we spent the last hour traveling the globe in our minds, or did Koradan successfully reach into the soil and pull the whole world up by its roots?
