Nisi Quieris: Nisi Quieris (Red Light Sound)
Ordered through discogs.com store
How do you make music when you lack any musical ability?
Ask Maurizio Bianchi. I've written about him here before. His earliest experiments with sound involved lo-fi turntable abuse, later noisy synthesizer knob shifting. I suppose he developed some techniques, because after a few years and many cassettes, he'd really developed some darkly moody harsh soundscapes. My favorites, and the most mature, are when he runs the sound through an Echoplex, smearing the sound beyond recognition.
After several years of intense work and networking, MB dropped out. When he returned in 1998, the work has been varied and mixed in quality. I mean, a comeback album of digital piano improvisations without any ability to play? Right.
It's been impossible to follow everything he's done in the years since. Some of the releases are small numbers, and all on obscure labels.
That's one of the great things about discogs, though. It's even better than Amazon if you want to track down unusual things. I found a store that listed another MB recording, and wound up order five of his discs.
I wondered, why was this released under the name Nisi Quieris? While tied to his work in some ways, it is also marked different. He is heard speaking, prominently, through the entire album. The voice is clear but slightly distorted (the distortion overtakes the voice a few times), darkened EQ, prominent, tight reverb. It's all Italian. He speaks neither especially fast or slow, without much drama. I'll probably never know what he's saying.
Unpinning the voice is always some sort of synth/processed sound. It's closer to what I'd expect an MB album to sound like.
There are twelve parts. Between each section, there's a quick fade out and and quick fade in on the next track. This seems to me to be clumsy. I think it would have been more interesting, more of an experience, if the sound was continuous, with different sections of the text marked by shifts in the synth sound.
Is this a new direction? There's a subsequent Nisi Quieris recording, actually credited to M. B. Maurizio Bianchi & Nisi Quieris. He's known for his, um, Baroque take on the English language. What does it mean if translated?
No comments:
Post a Comment