Aktuala

A Milanese collective headed up by avant-world-music lifer Walter Maioli, in consort with his wife Laura and a range of other players, Aktuala sometimes get pegged as the Italian Third Ear Band. There’s something to it, I guess, in so far as both bands imply digging into the distant past to access the future; they’re also both in tune with the amorphousness and improvisatory spirit of a late sixties, early seventies counterculture. But Aktuala always felt more spacious and more informed by improvised jazz than other groups undertaking similar astral explorations. They know how to meander – the first few minutes of “When The Light Began” take time to pull into focus, but when Aktuala find their way, locking into unison phrases around the three-minute mark, there’s a gentle melodic sensibility that gets quietly teased out across the album; tunes pass from instrument to instrument, slowly mutating, while aleatory drift plays out as the backdrop.