Chris Ianuzzi’s “Maze”

04/26/2022

A NoHo Arts music review of Chris Ianuzzi’s “Maze” album.

Chris Ianuzzi is a New York-based, innovative and highly regarded electronic musician and composer. Over his decades-long career, he has worked with such luminaries as Vangelis, Suzanne Ciani, ex-Tangerine Dream member Peter Baumann. Also, he has scored the electronic sound design music for HBO’s “From the Earth to the Moon” series co-produced by Ron Howard and Tom Hanks. In addition, he’s created soundscapes and interactive musical environments for Mastercard and themes for various A&E programs and channels.

His ‘music’ creates a kind of hyper real world. And with its entirely electronic sound, or manipulations of organic sounds and instruments, like the genius of Thomas Dolby, he creates something more than music, more than anything that he chooses to create it with. The whole becoming very much more than that parts therein. There’s a kind of aching sadness to it, a beauty in the intimate tics and twitches and echos, a trippy, powerful, darkness.

The tracks are purposeful, meaningful, like a ghost story meant as a warning, not just to entertain. The Gorillas touched on this, even Gary Neuman, and like all those post-punk, industrial, techno artists that push boundaries and invent cliffs to plummet off, Ianuzzi gives new meaning to music.

Chris Ianuzzi’s “Maze” is not mainstream. Could you dance to it? Totally, if you were completely in the mood. And, if you weren’t, this record could quickly get you there. It’s all urgent, visceral, cinematic, mind-melding music, vocals and soaring Moog references and routinely unidentifiable moments that directly connect to some far distant memory.

It’s ingenious and moving and absolutely brilliant.

Like the inventor himself, “Maze” is hard to define. It’s electronica, it’s soundscape and it’s intangible volatile vocals full of drama and pain, but in a really really gorgeous punk way. I loved it. I couldn’t stop listening to it in fact, which was a weird way to make Sunday night dinner I can tell you…but there you are. This record gets inside your head, makes itself some room and stays there. Epic.

The AI-created video for “March of Madness” isn’t like anything you’ve seen before, I can almost guarantee. Created by Ethem Serkan Sökmen and İlke Köse, using a CLIP-Guided-Diffusion notebook called Disco Diffusion and other various AI tools and techniques. Utterly Amazing. Loved it.

Watch the A.I.-powered music video for “March of Madness”