Essential compilation of NYC virtuoso composer, Vito Ricci. While going virtually unrecognized amongst the other downtown New York titans he worked with, Ricci has built quite the catalog of music and achievements. With over 50 scores written for ballet, theatre, film, video, and concerts, the depth of Ricci's works seems to be endless and vast in genre. Solo piano music, electronic works, song cycles, improvisations, and string quartets make up the body of his long career in the avant-garde and while being respected in his circle of artists, musicians, and poets it wasn't until recently that the outside of the circle took notice. Amsterdam's Music From Memory label whom has released the gorgeous ambient works of Gigi Masin, the ethno boogie of Joan Bibiloni, and now the work of the person behind their label name. Here are some words on how they came release this collection...

Our label is run by three people. A mutual friend of ours introduced us to Vito's Music From Memory, many years ago. He had bought it on eBay and at that time we were starting our second label and looking for a good name for it. We started going through our record collections to find some interesting words or titles. Vito's album struck us very much so we decided to use it for our label name. Then somewhere around our third release I got a letter from a good friend in Canada who I had introduced Vito's music to. He had gotten in touch with Vito to buy some copies of the album. He told Vito about our naming our label "Music from Memory" and after a while Vito contacted us to say he was very happy to hear this. We started talking and quickly felt that we wanted to do a release together. As a label we started out wanting to do something with all this music we had discovered over the years-a lot of obscure and unknown music across the board-we all are very heavily into music and long-time collectors. And we also started a small second-hand record store in Amsterdam, basically making our record fetish into our jobs and in combination with the label this is working well. All our releases are more like overviews of what artists have done, curated, with their/our own tastes, rather then doing a straight reissue of an album. And in Vito's case there is a lot of amazing unreleased material. We think he is a talented, interesting, and versatile artist with a distinguished musical handwriting and personal musical universe. He has sent us deep meditative drone-like pieces lasting up to 45 minutes but also shorter electronic and rhythmic stuff, beautiful ambient pieces and dance music ... it's all there! We had already finished a playlist for a single album but after getting more material from cassette tapes he had put out, and reassessing the music we already had. We are now moving toward a double album of his works that should be out early in the next year.

• gatefold sleeve
• music label: Music From Memory 2015

reviewed by Herman Hermit 6/2015