CDOTD 3/28/2023

 Maurizio Bianchi: Telmegiddo (The Last Cassette-tape Decomposition) (Menstrual Recordings)

Purchased mail order directly from label

I've written on this blog often enough that I feel like a narrative is starting to arise. I also think possibly I'm repeating myself. I also also think I should probably keep my comments more sparse.

I written before of my youthful (into my 20s) interest in industrial and noise music. There were some good sources for buying some of these things here, specifically Eide's. Greg Kostelich was running the record department, and would buy one or two copies of obscure albums knowing that a few regulars, one being me, would more than likely buy them. He stocked the Diamanda Galás LP on Metalanguage as soon as it was released, and I was there to buy it immediately. It was also a time when you could buy used records especially cheap and could often find things that weren't on the shelves otherwise. 

I hunted through the stacks at Eide's with great dedication, often going over the same sections visit after visit. I don't want to miss something newly placed, or might have overlooked. I had come across the artist named MB a few times (MB = Maurizio Bianchi), and found a pair of his LPs there, filed in the wrong location E for Endometrio, the first of two titles for the pair). This was...c.1984-85.

It was another case of, I hadn't heard anything like those records before. Let's start by saying, no melodies, no recognizable instruments. Everything was washed in a haze of reverb or echo. Details were obscured. I wasn't sure whether I thought it sounded like machines operating a long distance away, or a return to the womb. Probably more that latter. 

I wondered a little how he made these recordings, but not much. It's now a case where I loved the atmosphere of an album without giving much thought about how simple and primitive it really was. I could say the same for the first Joy Division album. At the time I was simply taken with the sound of the band, the atmosphere of dread, the evocative singer who couldn't actually sing. I still enjoy that record (and get annoyed at every teenager I see wearing the t-shirt who I know hasn't actually listened to the album) though now I hear it and can tell what primitive musicians they were. But it just goes to show, I'd rather listen to someone with great ideas but less execution, than someone with incredible execution but few ideas. 

I wrote yesterday about putting on a particular Nurse With Wound LP (another artist I followed in the 1980s) to put on something atmospheric as an escape from the grim reality of the United States. Yet another mentally ill person deciding to murder innocent people with weaponry better fit for combat than hunting or self-defense, guns more easily purchased than cigarettes. 

MB released a huge number of cassettes going back to 1979, under the name at the time of Sacher-Pelz. His earliest experiments (and fair to call them that) involved lo-fi turntable abuse. He eventually stepped up to working with synthesizers, and found his footing when he started to smear everything through an echoplex. Like I said, primitive.

Then after five years of intense activity, he suddenly retired. I understand he became a Jehovah's Witness. He returned to releasing music/sound fifteen years later, his reputation having grown through the years. I have that first CD he released after coming out of retirement. I can't tell you how awful I thought it was. I've heard a few since that were better, more of a return of what he did effectively, but it's the post-turntable, pre-retirement recordings that interest me.

I thought I'd spin this, the first of a two-CD set, issuing on CD two albums recorded in 1982/83 and unofficially released to cassette in 1990. 

It's not my favorite of his releases of the period, but how does one even judge these things except by pure visceral reaction? Through the haze of the echoplex there is some sort of slowed-down voice, indicating to me that the pre-processed sound source is at least in part sound recordings rather than synthesizers. Ultimately it doesn't matter that much, it's just my instinct to try to figure out how things are made.

Wrap yourself in the MB cocoon!