Piero Fragola’s Concrete Noir flickers between frequencies of lust, loss, and low-end revelation. Romance Ruins, the debut album and first release on the freshly minted Frequens Records, plays like a séance for the 21st century’s burnt-out romantics – those who still believe in beauty, even when it’s covered in the ashes of incinerated memory.
Fragola, a multimedia conjurer already known for We Love (on Ellen Allien’s BPitch Control) and ANGLE (Tiptop Audio Records), now builds his church of sound with modular bones from Florence, Italy. Every pulse and throb is hand-soldered on Tiptop Audio’s ART modular system: no presets, no shortcuts, just voltage sculpted into poetry. These aren’t skeletal sketches or aimless drones; they’re full-blooded songs that move with menace and grace, like a nightclub sermon from the ruins of Berlin or Florence.
Dream, the album’s eerie centerpiece, arrives like a broadcast from inside a cracked porcelain doll. The accompanying video could have been directed by Jan Švankmajer in collaboration with a sleep-deprived AI. Puppets twist and twitch, rooms decay under spectral light, and Fragola’s voice drifts through the static: neither machine nor man, but something caught in between. There’s a peculiar tenderness to it, a soft pulse beneath the mechanical ritual. It’s the sound of longing reassembled from spare parts.
Watch the video for “Dream” below:
Across Romance Ruins, Fragola smuggles melody into the machinery. The synths press against you, dense and deliberate. The beats hit with physical authority, as if the speakers were trying to remind you that electricity still has weight. Romance Ruins feels like an art installation disguised as an album; each track a projection of emotion into circuitry. His background as a designer and lecturer seeps through every texture: this is not music made for playlists but for rooms, for bodies, for the kind of nights when time seems elastic and your pulse syncs to the bass.
The conceptual throughline, romanticism as destruction and rebirth, is delivered through instinct. Fragola’s romantic hero isn’t a Byronic dreamer, rather a scavenger, piecing together fragments of passion from electronic wreckage. The “ruins” in the title are of meaning itself.
Listen to Dream below and preorder Romance Ruins here.
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