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Pietro Zollo — The Future Is Now
(Projekt 617026236124, 2025, DL)

by Peter Thelen, Published 2025-12-30

The Future Is Now Cover art

The science fiction tomes and films of yesteryear often predicted a radical future with technologies like instant teleportation, flying cars, routine interplanetary travel, lifespans of hundreds, or even thousands of years, the ability to travel forward and backward in time, and much more. Most of those predictions have yet to come true, maybe further off into the future they will, or maybe never! Certainly one fact is true — yesterday’s future is now, even if it’s not what we were hoping for or expecting. That is the premise of Pietro Zollo’s latest album (his sixteenth), The Future Is Now. The ten instrumental tracks herein offer powerful, yet delicate imagery in a variety of ways, building structures from loops and synthesis, a gentle evolutionary fabric that immerses the listener in some introspective soundworld, often built on gentle melodies and pastel colors, other times on gentle floating waves and spacious evocations, all the while remaining warm and subtle, never edgy and treacherous. Much like an labyrinthine soundtrack to some mystical future, each of the ten pieces here follows its own unique pace and projects a different feeling that a listener can absorb, each a sheer work of minimalist beauty. Some pieces, like the opener “The Delta at Sunset” and the title track, are propelled by a simple melodic structure on a muted piano that eventually blossoms into shimmering beauty, while others like “The Unseen Future,” “Within the Boundless,” and “Deep End” offer a sound more akin to classic floating ambient, built from slow-evolving loops and overlapping drifts of subtle vapor. When I think of the three previous Pietro Zollo releases I reviewed earlier this year (April, Fragmented Patterns and Abstraction), this latest release doesn’t find a convenient comparison there, yet it seems to follow a similar trajectory in that each piece reveals itself slowly as a matter of course.

Filed under: New releases, 2025 releases

Related artist(s): Pietro Zollo

More info
http://projektrecords.bandcamp.com/album/the-future-is-now

 

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