** 300 copies only, double LP + poster** Now widely celebrated after decades spent lingering in the shadows, the remarkable context of Italian experimental music that emerged, across the 1970s, ’80s, and ’90s, has become regarded as one of the most unique and thrilling creative outpourings occurred during the 20th Century. Incredibly diverse, comprising artists like Franco Battiato, Luciano Cilio, Giusto Pio, Roberto Cacciapaglia, Walter Maioli, Juri Camisasca, Francesco Paladino, Pier Luigi Andreoni, Riccardo Sinigaglia, and projects like Aktuala, Telaio Magnetico, Futuro Antico, The Doubling Riders, and numerous others, the singularity of this loose movement found its definition through the particulars of its relationship to popular forms like progressive rock and jazz. Where many experimental musicians of this era, working in geographies like Europe and the United States, moved from a position of radical avant-gardism toward more accessible realizations of organized sonority, artists from Italy tended to begin their careers within popular music and move toward overtly experimental forms. One such case was Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale, an amorphous project led by the husband and wife duo, Giacomo Di Martino and Edda “Terra” di Benedetto, whose 1978 self-titled debut remains one of the defining artefacts of the era. Now, launching back into action with the project’s first album in years, Psych-Out Records delivers “Navicomete”, a towering double LP comprising a ‘suite of sound poetry’ divided into four parts. Composed using theatrical and sound poetry techniques, and enlisting the contributions of seminal figures like Walter Maioli, Arturo Stalteri, and Vincenzo Zitello, alongside others, it’s an astounding odyssey of wild rhythms, textures, tones, ambiences, and vocalizations, guided into being by a startling sense of rigour in its search for true creative freedom. Immersive, ecstatic, and wholly engrossing, this beautifully produced double LP is issued in a highly limited, hand numbered edition of 300 copies coming in the thickest gatefold sleeve ever encountered in years, with an accompanying poster, offering a towering proof of the enduring vitality of Italy’s radical musical hive mind.

Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale is the brainchild of Giacomo Di Martino and his wife, the actress and singer Edda “Terra” di Benedetto. Like many of his peers, Di Martino first emerged within the context of popular music, working in numerous Italian beat bands, before finding enormous success as a pop star as a member of I Giganti, whose 1971 LP, “Terra In Bocca”, is often cited as a spark for the change in Italian music that would emerge over the coming years. When the project came to a close not long after the album’s release, Di Martino’s ambitions quickly led him down even more radical paths.

Launched during the same period that Di Martino and Benedetto were members of the legendary experimental super group, Telaio Magnetico, with Franco Battiato, Juri Camisasca, Lino ‘Capra’ Vaccina, and Roberto Mazza, Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale stands among the most radically experimental projects to emerge from Italy during the 1970s, with its 1978 self-titled debut resting uncomfortably at the outer boundaries of what is often referred to as Italian Minimalism: an aural journey within territories where the borders blur, traversing explicit avant-gardism and extended techniques, arpeggiating minimalism, forward-thinking reconfigurations of balladic song, drifting ambience, vocal drone, and the more aggressive and improvisational temperaments of kosmische and prog.

Over its more than half a century of activities, Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale has issued a slow trickle of remarkable releases, in each case immersing the listener in the project’s enduring, singular sound world. Now, fourteen years since we last heard from them, the duo of Mino De Martino and Terra Di Benedetto return with their fifth full-length: the astounding double LP “Navicomete”.

Recorded over the course of a five year period, the album, composed of 20 tracks, divided into four parts – “The Dream, the Death, the Rainbow”; “A Network of Souls Envelops the Planet”; “About Living and Dying”; and “The Essence of Light“ – was written by Terra Di Benedetto and performed by Mino De Martino, alongside an incredible cast of musicians, including seminal figures like Walter Maioli, Arturo Stalteri, and Vincenzo Zitello, all of whom have worked with Benedetto and De Martino in the past, alongside other new contributors. Self-described as a ‘suite of sound poetry’, the lyrics – incorporating references to Dante Alighieri’s “Divine Comedy” – are sung or recited in multiple languages, including English, Italian, Latin, Albanian, and Portuguese, while the musical elements were composed using theatrical and sound poetry techniques.

Retaining the psychedelic and experimental touchstones that helped define the band’s early work, “Navicomete” carves a fascinating intersection between the space-rock excursions of bands like Hawkwind and Gong, the more ambient depths explored by kosmische projects like Popol Vuh and Tangerine Dream, the wild folk-infused explorations of Third Ear Band and Futuro Antico, joyous progressive absurdism, and explicitly experimental tactics like the incorporation of field recording, drone, musique concrète, and sound poetics, culminating as a sprawling, immersive journey – shifting between drivingly rhythmic and wide open, drifting passages – marked by a profound sense of abstraction without ever fully departing from a sense of narrative and worldly truth.

Incredibly ambitious and timeless, roughly half a century into their activities, “Navicomete” brings the truly singular territories first woven into being during the 1970s by Albergo Intergalattico Spaziale’s debut album, roaring into the present day, feeling as relevant and potent as ever. Issued by Psych-Out Records as a beautifully produced double LP, issued in a highly limited, numbered edition of 300 copies, with an accompanying poster, this one is a total brain-melter. Let’s hope we don’t have to wait another fourteen years until we hear from them again!