"In ship log books and navigational news stories that recount the long intercontinental oceanic crossing of centuries past, one may read accounts in which navigators testify to witnessing an amazing and marvellous nocturnal phenomenon. Suddenly the sea would become luminous. The sailing ships would be bathed in light emanating from the darkest abysses and would be transported into a dream world. Today we have since discovered the agent responsible for that miracle: a bioluminous protist one millimetre in length, known as Noctiluca Scintillans. Suspended in total darkness, these dinoflagellates scintillate in absolute silence. And the notes of Oreobambo's music also seem to spring forth from the same profound depths and are surrounded by the same silence.

The music of the last millennium has been born of thought and stimulates thought itself. "Good" music has been that which succeeds in accompanying thoughts, aspirations, supermarket consumerism and dreaming wide awake. This music has its roots in the use of the current musical notation, introduced by Guido d'Arezzo in 1026. The urge to encage sound, however, is an older and not exclusively western phenomenon: an impulse that has manifested itself throughout all the great ancient musical civilizations. In China for example, Ling-lun devised some sound patterns using bamboo canes imitating the song of a pair of pheasants and called them "The Laws". These agreements have allowed men to move towards the study of music by becoming musicians; technically perfect but imprisoned at birth by an iron consensus, by a sound syntax that irremediably limits the potentiality of being. In antiquity "the musician" was a natural and spontaneous phenomenon, a born shaman and not an artist or academic, an isolated being, an intermediary figure between the world of men and that of the spirits thanks to the sonorous harmony that he managed to produce. Orpheus. The child Mozart.

Scintillans proceeds along the path initiated by Lymantria with renewed vigour and with such intensity that it renders three-dimensional, luminous and colourful the sonorous vibrations. Oreobambo's notes leave no room for thoughts. The classical orchestra and piano tones are fused into an explosion of sonority of various ancient instruments from the far east. From China there are a variety of flutes, drums and stringed instruments such as the guzhen and the luan: "the guitar of the moon". A variety of Indonesian xylophones and metallophones are also present, such as the gedang, the kempur, the sewukan, the saron, the kenong, the gambang, the gong besar, the bonang, the angklung, the Javanese gong and the Korean piri. Upon first listen, the sonorities are rather unfamiliar to us, as in all of Oreobambo's works, but then they find accordance with the hidden and frozen part of our being that recognizes and merges itself with them. In the same way that Samoyed shamans used musical instruments as a mount from which to set off on "voyages", this silence disguised as melody introduces the listener into a new and open world. Here musical instruments are steeped in the magic with which they were played in the most remote ancient times, and the executioner is emptied as he plays. Thus, in a pressing crescendo, the last note projects us out beyond the boundary: perhaps this CD has escaped from the hands of the composer himself and lives its own life."

Maria Capaldi, 1998