Delayed x Perpendicular: Marco Ragni & Sandra Mason
My experience with Marco and Sandra started last year at Perpendicular Festival. There is something quite special about having total trust in the people organizing a festival, which is definitely the case with the Perpen crew. You get excited about seeing artists you already love on the lineup, but perhaps even more about the names you don't know yet, because chances are there's a new world waiting to be explored.
On a moonlit night at La Cabaña, Irina and I shared the booth with Marco and Sandra. They opened the stage; we closed it. I was blown away by the smoothness of their set and the subtle chemistry between the two of them behind the decks. Their track selection was exquisite. I knew that once we got home, I'd be digging through their work.
And what an exploration that has been.
Sandra Mason and Marco Ragni arrive at this territory from somewhat different directions.
Sandra Mason is the alias of Enrica Borsatto, originally from Padua and now based in Rome. Her background is deeply rooted in music research, from working at radio stations and record shops to a growing list of experimental projects and collaborations. Her musical interests move freely through ambient, avant-garde, wave, psychedelia, and leftfield music, with that curiosity finding its way into several different outlets. She co-hosts Horny Music for Ambient People on Lyl Radio with Marco Caizzi, runs the wonderfully sideways YouTube project Cocktail Naïf, and forms the ambient duo Fondazione with writer Francesco Pacifico. But perhaps my favorite detail is the name of her SoundCloud account: Music From The Living Room. It almost feels like a clue to her approach. There is something about Sandra's selections that comes from a private listening culture, where strange records that might normally live on someone's shelf or appear during a late-night radio program are suddenly brought into a room full of people and asked to coexist.
Marco's path is different. A DJ and producer with a long-running connection to Serendipity Club and the central Italian underground, he draws on ambient, downtempo, tribal, bass, and techno, often held together by psychedelic rhythms and hypnotic textures. His collaborative project with Valentin Birgan, Plants Army Revolver, offers another window into that approach. Built around hardware, modular synthesis, and drum machines, the project moves comfortably between ambient and techno. Their Yguana EP, released by Avian in 2019, is a particularly good example of Marco's relationship with rhythm and texture. His ambient side doesn't necessarily mean the absence of rhythm. It's often more about what happens when rhythm becomes hazy, ritualistic, or secondary to everything happening around it. He's also involved in Saydna with drummer Leonardo Pucci and Absira with our long-time favorite ABSIS, continuing that interest in what can happen when different musical backgrounds meet.
And that's perhaps what makes Marco and Sandra so interesting together. Their individual tastes already cover enormous ground, but when the two meet behind the decks, another language begins to emerge. Luckily, they've been joining forces more frequently over the past few years, with new projects naturally arising from that relationship. One of them is Aula, a listening-oriented space at Cantina Raìna in Montefalco, Umbria. Built around a custom hi-fi system, Aula favors long-form performances, depth, and physical sound. Its manifesto includes a line that seems equally appropriate for Marco and Sandra's work together: “Whatever the form, the essence must be free.”
That brings us back to Perpen.
This year, Marco and Sandra closed Saturday's program at La Cabaña, carrying the cabin into the early morning hours. It's the time of night (or better say, early morning) when the woods outside start to get chilly, but inside that little cabin, there is a particular kind of energy. Over the course of the festival, every artist who passes through changes its character for a few hours.
Marco and Sandra created their own version of it. Warm enough to keep things cozy, quirky enough to keep you awake, and smooth enough to make the hours disappear.
The set opens with a spoken mantra about living spirit, lineage, and transmission. From there, they let the records do the talking. I'm aware I'm getting dangerously close to cliché territory here, but sometimes it's difficult to describe music when admiration gets in the way. Listening to Marco and Sandra together does that to me. There is an enormous amount of trust between the two of them, a shared curiosity, and an ability to put records next to each other that you might never have imagined occupying the same space.
A year after discovering them in that same cabin, I found myself there again, still wondering where the next record would take us.
Sets like this, and artists like Marco and Sandra, are a big part of what makes Perpendicular so special.
Tracklist:
Organ Of Corti - Calvaria
Laszlo Umbreit, Sirah Foighel Brutmann, Eitan Efrat - For Her
Lou Drago - Patience To see
Kajsa Lindgren - The Inanimate World pt. 2
Rat Heart - Back 2 Front Pts: 1-2
Pefkin - My Breath The Sea
Nika Son - 34°55’35.4”N 36°16’14.3”W
Grad_U - MR1 Scan
General Magic & Pita - Deep Fridge
Perila - Slay Resorts
Soundwalk Collective With Patti Smith - Medea
Neel - Post Landing
Multicast Dynamics - Circle One
Karim - Bakh
Kane Ikin - Contrail + SM - Temple Forest voice over