Vinyl-On-Demand :: - Maurizio Bianchi

The Wire

Black 43

Punk ist wie ne Religion

Paristransatlantik

With M.B. Archives , Vinyl On Demand has produced yet another weighty 5 vinyl glossy box set which, if you're an annual subscriber as the label recommends – and it's a damn good idea considering what's on offer this year – comes with a bonus 7" of Bianchi's earliest incarnation, Sacher-Pelz. Compiling all the tapes he released on his own label between 1980 and 1983, namely Com.SA, Computer S.p.A., Voyeur Tape, Noise-O-Rama, Cold Tape, Dicembre 1980, Industrial Tape, S.F.A.G., I.B.M. and Technology 1 , it provides, along with the two 5CD boxes, Archeo MB 1 and 2 on Ees't, a definitive overview of Bianchi's early work. Siegmar Fricke's remastering and digital transfer of the tapes is immaculate, not that Bianchi never showed the slightest interest in sound quality, hi-fi, lo-fi or even no-fi. By the time he reached his mid twenties, he'd digested punk, Industrial, musique concrète, contemporary instrumental and electronic music, and was ready to disgorge his mass media discomfort on a society harassed by government corruption and the threatened liberation promised by the Brigate Rosse, with the heights (depths?) of disco as its accompanying escapist soundtrack. Bianchi's visionary manifestos embraced the no-nothingness of abstract noise assault, whether dealing with the self-generative uncontrollability of its inner structure, the chance possibilities of systematic trial and error, or self-devised methods of composition he called de-composition. This essentially was a strategic rearrangement of deliberately obscured sound sources, especially other people's, using a Lucier-like procedure (cf I Am Sitting in A Room ) of disfiguration (re-recording the original source until it became but a trace), primitive effects, loops and, notoriously, by deceptive stop-starts of tape decks and turntables. Even his use of presets and effects was unorthodox, his Korg synth, Roland KS20 rhythm-box, Echo-box, a two-track tape machine often disintegrating into feedback atoms of pink noise. Bianchi's aims and methodology were as shocking and deceptive as they were resolute, and almost a quarter century later they've lost nothing of their vitality. However he samples or reproduces the spirit of German electronic music (early Kraftwerk and Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler, Sesselberg, Rolf-Ulrich Kaiser's collective) or post- Etudes de Bruits musique concrète, Bianchi always ends up with a highly personal synthesis, informal, almost burlesque. Not surprisingly, since he was hanging around with the likes of William Bennett (Whitehouse, Come Org), Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions), Philippe Fichot (Die Form) and Monte Cazazza, the music is steeped in the kind of infatuated Industrial negation Boyd Rice explored with his decentred/locked/looped grooves: disorientation by shock tactics. Take for instance Technology 1 , whose penetrating rainbow electronics are embedded in dissonant amplified signals that churn and weave distortedly, a floating sculpture of multidirectional sound mass. Or Cold Tape 's claustrophobic tape acceleration, medium as message, repeating its mutant sequences to form an irregular continuum of deranged trance-like squeaks, abruptly switching to the disturbance of backward turntables, their broken loops a distant recollection of Neu!'s experiments with velocity and the inherent imperfections of recorded media. Although Bianchi's predilection for momentum and abrasion creates an urgent apotheosis, his selection and use of material does obey clear compositional rules of his own creation. Noise-O-Rama 's exemplary use of sudden feedback explosions set against a modular wave constriction shows how far his technique could develop from minimalist principles without ever repeating itself. Elsewhere, Com.SA 's linear electronics conflagrate with no apparent narrative logic, while S.F.A.G illuminates symphonic vistas of empowering magnitude anticipating Black Light District's mournful, mellotron-like saturation. There's simply no way to discover all the worlds these recordings create at one listen, since they reveal something new and extraordinary at each hearing, not only as historical artefacts but as eternally contemporary documents of pure artistic rage. Consume with caution. –MA

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