ETHERNITY in 2 lp vinyl, available
«We could try to define this album with just one word, but it is impossible. Any adjective must be accompanied by several other adjectives to be able to minimally describe this album. The first attribute, without a doubt, must be heterogeneous. Many artists tend to settle in and repeatedly use the same resources, so most albums tend to sound uniform, with a great similarity between tracks, be it in sounds, rhythmic structures or harmonic conjugation. Ethernity is widely diverse, seeming to have been composed by different artists, from different eras and with disparate musical genres...».
— Industrial Complexxx
«Instead of an exposition, “Ethernity” begins with an interlude. A first hint that this album is somehow different. Whereby the otherness quickly becomes a tricky thing, after all the Italian producer uses sounds, moods and production-related procedures, all of which initially seem familiar. Special features result less from the individual ingredients, more from their ambiguous montages: once the noise scratches of the said interlude are polished away, a music reveals that could quickly be tagged as post-club. Listeners who have not noticed Zamboli in the past with its foggy and very fast techno might not even think about club music. So club or not? Both seem equally plausible - and it is precisely the principle of simultaneity that defines this album.
There is the warmth of the analog synthesizer. With Zamboli, however, these sounds can never really be made comfortable. There is the dictum of the repetitive, maybe even - after all, we are here with Mille Plateaux - the idea of “difference and repetition”. Something that Zamboli elaborates in parts, but never raises to a basic principle. There are too many fractions for that. For example when a long chattering track like “Compossibility” mutates into a veritable banger, or when the rattling patches from “Take Me Somewhere” are suddenly interrupted by vocal passages that also work well in a grunge song from the 90s would have. Atonal sounds and harmony are constantly intertwined, light and dark sounds overwrite each other: Zamboli installs small contradictions everywhere…»
Gardens of the World - # 8 , Christian Blumberg DAS FILTER
«L’esordio di SImona Zamboli per Mille Plateaux,Ethernity,è un album denso come il mercurio,denso come lo spazio profondo di galassie lontane. Una dozzina di tracce tracciano traiettorie che portano in territori inesplorati,tra folate di vento subspaziale e ambientazioni marziali…»
Stefano Mandolini, Rockerilla
«L’esordio di SImona Zamboli per Mille Plateaux,Ethernity,è un album denso come il mercurio,denso come lo spazio profondo di galassie lontane. Una dozzina di tracce tracciano traiettorie che portano in territori inesplorati,tra folate di vento subspaziale e ambientazioni marziali…»
Stefano Mandolini, Rockerilla
«We need more electronic composers like Zamboli, as the field is primed for exponential growth. Even a cursory glance at the popular electronic music chart reveals that innovation has stalled in the mainstream. When Mille Plateaux was launched in 1993, it had access to avenues of exposure that have been greatly curtailed since then. And yet the label’s influence has rippled across TV and film soundtracks and even hip-hop in the intervening years. Zamboli has the potential to become a game changer; Ethernity is not her first album, but it may be the one that makes the biggest impact. It’s the sound of the future, now».
Richard Allen,A Closer Listen
«…perché esiste uno stretto legame tra ciò che riteniamo essere il nostro “dentro” e tutto quello che consideriamo il nostro “fuori”, tra ciò che è apparente e sensoriale e ciò che, invece, è spirituale ed emotivo; la musica, con le sue ricerche, le sue sperimentazioni, le sue evoluzioni. le sue divagazioni elettroniche e le sue continue metamorfosi ritmiche è, senza alcun dubbio, uno dei più validi ed efficaci strumenti per evidenziare queste interazioni che sono sia cosmiche, che chimiche, fisiche e biologiche».
Michele Sanseverino,Paranoid Park
«Un suono pervasivo, un’epifania di synth analogici e glitch per una musica torrenziale: è l’elettronica di Simona Zamboli, sound engineer/designer approdata alla prestigiosa Mille Plateaux. Apocalittico e psichico, oscuro nelle sue trame caotiche, Ethernity è una delle migliori produzioni elettroniche degli ultimi anni, dove dimensione analogica e digitale si fondono in una soluzione ribollente».
80/100
Andrea Prevignano, RUMORE
«Eternity in the ether? On her label debut with Mille Plateaux , the Milanese producer Simona Zamboli sounds as puzzling as the title of her album. Remnants of techno tracks can be found in their analog-digital hybrids at best as rhythmic patterns that rarely need a beat, but rely on repetition. In this “ultra-black” story touted, the club is just a memory from the pre-pandemic world, with the reality of Ethernity but probably no longer compatible. Zamboli, who in other publications, for example on Insane Industry, pursues her predilection for rumbling stick techno, succeeds here in an apparently paradoxical coexistence of amorphous and structure, a kind of abstract downtempo, if you will, in which atonal frequencies are next to one another harmonious figures coexist peacefully, brittle-repellent and strangely cozy-warm at the same time. For all its level of detail, the music never seems to be in love with it, but it does seem like an end in itself, a noisy, strange attractor».
Tim Caspar Boehme
— Groove Mag
