CDOTD 5/24/2023

 Maurizio Bianchi: GENI-Z (Steinklang)

Purchased through mail order from Bandcamp

For the two-three people who check in with this blog regularly, you'd have probably noticed a longer gap than usual between postings. I started another post about Rolf Kühn, and I may return to it. I've had on Ornette Coleman and Joachim Kühn's Colors, and one of the four discs in The Pyramids' Aomawa (The 1970s Recordings) collection. I've been busy, also attended a memorial for Tracy Turner, haven't been of a mind to continue this exercise for a few days, and nobody's exactly lighting a fire under my butt to make me post more. I may post some thoughts on those in the future.

This disc arrived yesterday from....Italy I guess? At least, overseas. I found it on Bancamp and noted the edition of 100, and figured why not. 

So welcome again to MBLand, the unhappiest place on Earth, Disneyland's least popular -land. 

I'll repeat what Adam MacGregor said about power electronics groups: it's often pretty hard to tell one from another, especially when there are no vocals. I don't know that I would characterize MB's recordings, even at their more abrasive and depressing, as being PE at all.

How would I describe his tapes and albums? He has enough of a history to be able to roughly place his albums into some general descriptions. The earliest tapes, under the name Sacher-Pelz, were largely turntable abuse. I've spent enough time with the reissues of these tapes to know that I've had enough. Sometime after he started using the MB moniker, he began primitive experiments on a Korg MS-20. The starkest of these are also tough to sit through, if preferable to the turntable tapes. His synth work developed over time, and he subsequently started making primitive two-track recordings, with the left and right channels completely isolated. Step by step, he's adding more techniques and equipment (a drum machine comes in at some point) when his first LPs are released. 

Then there's what I would consider a breakthrough in his development: running all sounds through a heavy fog of delay. The smeared sound would define MB albums until his retirement around 1984. It's easy to call these recordings "dark ambient" (well before the term even came to be) but the descriptor at least puts you in the neighborhood.

When he returned in 1998, it's hard for me to describe exactly what's going on. His analog equipment has largely as far as I can tell, been abandoned. He's sometimes collaborating. Of those albums I've heard, some have similarities to the later pre-retirement albums: noisy but soft-edged. There have been so many releases in the subsequent years, I question whether he himself has copies of all of them. 

Why did I buy this? I suppose it was an impulse buy. Maybe I'm a bit of a sucker for limited editions. There may be 200 artists out there doing something that sounds similar. But you know, MB is my guy. I can't track down everything that sounds like this, and don't want to do so. And maybe I'm still interested in the progression of his work, despite (or maybe because) there are portions of his body of work I don't like at all. (As I think I've noted before, his first CD after returning from retirement is abysmally bad.)

Maurizio is back in "dark ambient" territory here. Tracks are long (four of five clock in at over 13 minutes apiece), and nothing seems as if it's in a hurry. Vaguely machine-like sounds rise and fall. Or is it breathing? Mechanical biologics? His tracks often ran long, distinguishing him from other industrial noise artists from the early 1980s. Tracks were sometimes limited in length by the a tape or LP side. Now, without such limitations, he's making the pieces as long as he sees fit, which happens to be around the same length.

Whatever is going on, he sounds like he has developed his work in ways he couldn't have imagined in his early analog days. For as much as I have an affection of the rough-and-ready analog pieces (some of them at least), this is digital, and not in a bad way. There's a clarity to the fuzziness? 

Maurizio's interesting take on the English language is on display in the notes: "Catalytic-sound material generated and encoded over the years 2015 to 2022 using nucleic-electronic sources and noise frequency sequences. Concretistic molecular images structured within my Opera's house." He also thanks Pharmaküstik for "genomic mixing."

Good ol' MB!