There are few more potent examples of the power that music holds over our memories than hearing a song and being instantly transported back to a specific time or place. But what if we could change the soundtrack retrospectively? If the scenes from our life played out on a big screen, how would we choose to score them? It’s an idea that Italian multi-instrumentalist Alessandro Cortini found himself preoccupied with on his latest album Avanti. Prior to making the record, Cortini rediscovered an archive of home videos made by his grandfather, who passed away a few years previously. Among the cache were several Super 8 films of family gatherings as well as hours of dinner-time conversations recorded on cassette for posterity. It was as if Cortini had unearthed a perfect fossil of his childhood. The films, however, were missing one crucial element – the sound. So Cortini decided he would restore the miss-ing audio in his own way, by composing a musical accompaniment to the footage. As it turned out, Cortini had a few blanks to fill in himself. The films exposed some inconsistencies in his memories, moments that he romanticised or misremembered. But what surprised him the most was that the recordings appeared to be almost as fallible as his recollections – both showed signs of degradation. Avanti is rich in anomalies and irregularities – much like our memories – which Cortini let creep into his compositions by recording live on a single synthesiser, the EMS Synthi AKS, without overdubs.
