It’s already been two years since Leonardo Martelli’s debut with the four-tracker ‘Menti Singole’. He has since been following the direction he took with this first release, at a rather slow path, releasing a lone and haunted mini-album, Previsto, in the meantime. With ‘Menti Singole Vol.2’, Martelli establishes a picture of his music, an update of his aspirations in the feminine. Sparse, clear-cut and slightly nerve-racking, “Micaela” opens the record with the precision of a neurosurgeon. The song can be seen in many ways as a good introduction to the music of the Italian musician – past and probably future. Ethereal string machines balance the nagging acid leitmotiv: as often with Martelli’s music, there’s something going on in the background, some anonymous forces operating off-screen. We can make the same assessment with “Alice”, the most obviously desperate tune on the record: the sad synth melody comes in as if it was trying to fill an emotional void, but the supposedly reassuring sentence is not complete, notes are missing. On “Laura” – just like with “Alice” – Martelli keeps on playing with the potential of abstraction of rap samples, a process we’re familiar with since Previsto. “Sofia” gives a particularly striking example of this weird game he likes to play as Biggie Smalls’ words get progressively eviscerated from their meaning. Backed by bare percussive samples (a numerical metronome, copyright-free digital ersatz of percussions), Sofia depicts – without any artifice – despair in a post-industrial world, where everything has lost any sense of materiality – while Previsto was still set in an industrial world of steaming factories. Disarmingly simple, ‘Menti Singole Vol.2’ offers electronic mourning music at its most elegant.

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