The music of Alessandro Niccoli’s long-in-the-works “Very Short In The Sun”, which is released as the Italian duo of Dr. Hackman and Niccoli, is an open field in which fans can experiment. The music is an amalgam of sounds, from found sounds, from electronic noises, from the raw, tortoise-shell sound of a small boat in the sea, and from the analog, wildwood, drone of a snapping turtle.

Niccoli’s music is rarely the same twice. The first time, he and Hackman showed off their new-age avant-garde fusion by mixing elements of jazz, electronica, and artificial intelligence. The second time, they took the results of their first experiment in the field, a solo piano performance, and turned it into a record of the same sound. The openness of the sounds has been a major challenge for Niccoli, who has been exploring the sonic possibilities of the sounds he creates through the centuries and the sounds he gets from the internet.

The usual response from critics is that Niccoli doesn’t bring the visual aspect of his music to the table. “You don’t have to be a trained musician to see what’s happening”, they argue. But we can, and at his presentation last year, Niccoli used a device called a shaker to create the sonic environment. Before the shaker, Niccoli’s music sounded like a lot of things, including the sea’s ocean sounds, the individual sound of a footfall on the sand, a filtered, hollowed-out radio echo, the fluttering of a flock of ducks.

At his first solo piano performance, in the New York Philharmonic, he used a shaker to create an almost airless world, where the sounds themselves became the sonic object. It’s an interesting, eerie, and unsettling thing to hear Niccoli’s music for the first time, and a little otherworldly, too. Niccoli’s music is a sloppy, smudgy mess. But also the kind of mess that makes you believe in its beauty.