Alessandro Cipriani uses cutting-edge technology to bring us closer to the music of a timeless oral tradition, including religious chant from the three Abrahamic traditions of Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. Musically and conceptually, this is an extraordinary CD, with wonderful sounds and human warmth. And as a result of Cipriani’s great sensitivity and gift for sound, the music becomes more a part of us, more a part of our contemporary language. And as the music sings to us, we feel more a part of the humanity it represents.

Joel Chadabe , Electronic Music Foundation site

I have been listening to Cipriani’s works for five or six years and I thought I knew his music. I was completely wrong because after this new CD I can no longer recognize him. ÒAl NurÓ is the revolution of a musical language. Why? Cipriani writes in the booklet “My latest works are a rewrite of pieces of oral traditions (more or less complex), including a trilogy on religious chant (Gregorian, Islamic, Jewish), a traditional Chinese piece, another Arabic, fragments of a piece of rock music composed without writing the music and other fragments from memory.” What does it mean? The melodic and rhythmic structures absorbed into these compositions are not simply quotations put in only for the taste of something exotic, but they signify an alive element that flourishes step by step. We can sometimes listen to polyphony that doesn’t belong to the old composition but to the new one. There is always great respect for the oral traditions; in fact the music of these civilizations has not been shattered, camouflaged and reduced to a loop for a schematic composition that nowadays we can easily hear everywhere. The melody, the rhythm, the single sound revive to create other melodies, rhythms and sounds. Cipriani puts a mosaic together and its tesserae are: time and space of music, the witchery of silence, spirituality, time/space seen through a soul. This is Cipriani’s new ways to constitute his medium.

Giuseppe Rapisarda, Computer Music Journal Volume 26 Number 3 Fall 2002 – M.I.T. Press