Italian composer Gigi Masin released two obscure albums, Wind (1986) and The Wind Collector (1991), which gradually amassed a cult following among fans of ambient music.
He also created the first side of Les Nouvelles Musiques de Chambre, Vol.
2, a 1989 split LP with This Heat's Charles Hayward on the Sub Rosa label, and one of Masin's pieces from this recording was eventually sampled by Björk and To Rococo Rot.
Masin continued releasing solo and collaborative works into the 21st century, eventually forming a trio called Gaussian Curve, whose album Clouds was released in 2014.
Music from Memory, the label that released that album, opened the floodgates on Masin's massive, mostly unreleased back catalog with the release of the double album Talk to the Sea, a retrospective spanning over 30 years of work.
Masin's serene, sparse, slowly paced compositions mainly consist of piano and synthesizer, but also feature guitar, horns, drums, and even Masin's languid, wistful vocals, which vaguely echo David Sylvian, but perhaps not as much of an acquired taste.
His music feels appropriately drifty ("Talk to the Sea" even features windchime-like tubular bells gently pealing in the breeze), but plenty of it has soft-pop inclinations, giving it a light accessibility.
Having said that, there are still some subtle experimental touches, such as the delayed, Fripp-like guitar shredding during "Music for Chameleons" and the backwards shifting loops and trumpet of "Little Faith." The CD version of this collection contains 23 tracks, and while the collection's generosity is appreciated, the similarity of many of the tracks results in a somewhat tiring two-hour listen.
This, of course, means that it's prime sleeping music, and worth investigation by aficionados of softer, more relaxed music.