Salvatore Mercatante : Post

Salvatore Mercatante doesn’t just stick to one vibe in his work. His albums ebb and flow from subtle techno to heady synth atmospheres to even Darkwave and ambient. Point being, a one-trick pony he is not. He goes where the muse takes him. Mercatante’s albums always surprise and build unique sound worlds where you can get lost in.

One his latest release, and first release on his own label noci miste, Mercatante has given us a series of short, sonic nuggets that sound and feel like experiments in noise and mood. Post doesn’t have a collective narrative per say, more so a feeling of coming across random thoughts and moments. There’s elements of Cluster, Brian Eno, and even avante garde composer John Cage, while still feeling very much a work of Mercatante.

There’s a handful of songs that hit the 3 to 5 minute mark, but the bulk of the 32 tracks on Post feel like ideas that come to you in sleep but are gone before your eyes open. Songs like “monde”, “FORGE”, and album closer “Chin” stick around long enough for us to dig our teeth into the flesh. They lock into the electronic German masters that came before, feeling fresh and alive in a kind of synthetic way. Big, bold, and dystopian in all the right ways.

But the vast majority of songs on Post are snippets of electronic noise that feel like fleeting thoughts in-between the longer pieces. That’s not a knock. It just has the vibe of AI working up to a longer thought(in dystopian sci-fi terms.) Opener “inotro” sound like a machine waking, while “winde” has a sort of whimsy to it that I’d love to sit in for an hour and just bask in its ease and light. “WOLS” is the sound of rebooting, while “multiple arrows pointing” has a darkness and ominous mood to it. Something wicked this way comes.

Salvatore Mercatante makes a bold choice in Post as his first release on his newly christened record label. It’s a dense and wild album that doesn’t fall into any easily labeled vibe. It’s a record that feels like walking into an Escher painting, stairs going nowhere, leading to some other fantastical place sideways upside down. Not every composer or musician can pull an album like this off without getting lost in their own creative maze, but since this is Salvatore Mercatante it works extremely well.

‘Post’ is out now via noci miste.