Tu M'

(This article’s English version was produced with AI-assisted translation)

At the dawn of the new millennium, the collaboration between Rossano Polidoro, Emiliano Romanelli and Andrea Gabriele took shape in the Tu M’ project, a tribute to the homonymous painting by Marcel Duchamp—a title that reads as a suspended, verb-less “you... me.” If in Duchamp’s work the task of completing the meaning is left to the viewer, in Tu M’s music that same responsibility falls to the listener. After all, it’s within that blind spot that ambient often thrives: an incorporeal art where unease and serenity can coexist in the same whisper, depending on the listener’s perception.

Driven by the intent to establish a connection between ambient, glitch and drone music—and reduced to a duo after Gabriele’s departure in 2002—the project began to distill a concept marked by faint contours: a never-localized elsewhere, a blurred becoming. This path was not only shaped in sound design but also in visual form: Tu M’ is also a video-installation and photographic project, whose material (marked by the dry, squared, hyper-reductionist aesthetics typical of the 2000s) is still available on their website.

The third volume of Monochromes arrives two years after the second, but more significantly, sixteen years after the first. Little foreshadowed these posthumous returns: the duo officially disbanded in 2012, and since then, their emissions—mental diaries of secluded visions—gradually dissolved into the web’s underground mesh, the very same network that once nourished them via netlabels and independent distros. For those who have lost themselves in the rarest strands of ambient, Monochromes Vol. 1 remains one of the genre’s most evocative and penetrating inner journals. Like Celer playing at the bottom of a boundless ocean, the duo explored the cosmos through dronic caresses and crepuscular ripples, crafting one of the most ethereal and contemplative forms of the genre—a sort of Stars Of The Lid turned minimalist laptop-music, stripped of any material anchor.

Let’s go back to the compendium, the beginning of the triptych. Monochromes gathers live recordings made for an A/V installation held in the summer of 2008, in Città Sant'Angelo, a town in the province of Pescara. What speaks is the breath of synthetic waves, like a Brian Eno stretched between two worlds, within a cosmic stillness that disintegrates the self to dissolve it into the eternal. Armed with two laptops, two mixers, two speakers and a video projector, the installation unfolded as a study on fragility—through audio-visual dissolves and one-dimensional sonic suspensions, defining a sensory perimeter where a constant hiss acts as the axis for infinite loops.

Vol. 3 continues the enchantment of its predecessors and expands it with further emotional immersions, where the escape from daily frenzy unfolds into a silent, regenerative retreat. It’s an abyssal suspension, a mystification of the less-is-more ethos: for the hour the album lasts, everything burdensome seems to melt away. There is no pain, and the self is undone. The ambient-drone theorem here mirrors the Buddhist concept of a drop in the ocean: a harmonic dilution of identity, where the individual is dematerialized into a broader breath. At times, echoes of the finest William Basinski emerge, and Tu M’, without ever raising their voice, brush against equally deep summits. If the first volume opened a threshold and the second consolidated it, this third one intensifies the peak, sealing the hypnotic power of a triptych with no center, orbiting only around its own breath. It’s a meditative art that drifts into the hypnagogic, where sleep paralysis does not frighten but consoles—and becomes a trace of cosmic belonging.

01/05/2025