- The Rome maestro's first full-length since 2019 presents six cuts of soothing techno at its most human.
- Donato Dozzy has long been a master of techno mantras—that is, if we take "mantra" to mean "mind vehicle," as it roughly translates from Sanskrit. Though rarely static enough to actually meditate to (save, perhaps, his entry in The Bunker New York's Going In series), his music has a way of transporting the mind, both into itself and through abstract vistas of his creation. This is the common thread across a diverse catalogue of releases, which, in the last decade or so, has included ambient compositions made entirely of vocal samples (Sintetizzatrice, with Anna Caragnano), a sound installation dedicated to a bridge (12H) and, perhaps most memorably, a collection of remixes of the experimental artist Bee Mask. Magda, an album of easily drifting, half-ambient techno, presents six new mantras that could only come from Dozzy's studio.
Magda's emotional palette is strikingly personal and sincere. The album is dedicated to his family and the Adriatic sea, and a feeling of loving homage runs through it. The title track and "Le Chaser" deliver a state of total bliss, but not the rushing euphoria we associate with club music. Their glowing chords and cascading arpeggios convey something deeper and more serene—nirvana, maybe, or the deep contentedness of familial love. For music with no lyrics, it feels courageously intimate.
Other tracks strike more ambiguous tones. "Franca" and "Velluto" paint landscapes at once warm and metallic—an aesthetic that recalls 2012's Voices From The Lake album. "Santa Cunegonda" recalls that LP, too, especially in its uncanny capacity for sonic storytelling. The ten-minute track is an epic in itself, beginning with a plod though a stark lunar landscape and finishing somewhere very different—namely, a silky mist of celestial pads and vaporous shakers.
Like much of Dozzy's music, Magda is an exercise in beauty and serenity, more zen ritual than catharsis. This is the sound of a DJ and producer who honed his craft in blissed-out Sunday afternoons at Panorama Bar, where he had a residency for two years, and on the wooded mountainside at The Labyrinth festival in Japan, where his annual performances made him the star of the event and a household name in techno. It's a welcome reminder of the emotional range of a genre whose current sound du jour is an ever-faster, ever-more-brutal vision of dystopia I like to refer to as "crisis techno." Magda, like much of Dozzy's best music, is a soothing beacon of techno at its most human.
Tracklist01. Velluto
02. Magda
03. Le Chaser
04. Franca
05. Santa Cunegonda
06. Lucrezia