Music from Italy

2014 repress, originally released in 1998. First issued by the Mnemonists' label (Dys in the U.S.) in 1982. M.B.: proto-electronics, compositions, arrangements. Mektpyo Bakterium is a work furnished of implacable plastic exasperation. The icy oppression, the hallucinative electronic wounds, are a precious and singular fact in a technological society brought to the limit. The emotion is pushed into dangerous zones, and unusual zones, and unusual tensions -- free biological groans of extreme e…

2014 repress, originally released in 1998. Reissue of a private LP, issued in an edition of 300 copies in 1982 by Maurizio Bianchi ; a skeletal extremist project that will then transform into the "soundtrack" of a movie with the same title, edited and directed by Paul Hurst. It's the setting of the griable pre-apocalyptic fossilization, the supreme lapidation of the meanness which creates the myth. There are actual melodies present -- dense and dark that mutate into harsh electronic outbur…

2014 repress, originally released in 2000. First issued on the Broken Flag label in the UK in an edition of 500 in 1983. A different style, providing some distance from all his previous works; a more expansive experimentation with multiple layers of synthesizer sounds. Still very intense. M.B.'s recordings come closest to classical electronics, but always with a very personal style. This CD edition also features an interview on Radio Popolare in Milan from 1/1/83. An English translation i…

2014 repress of these classic M.B. albums (M.B. = Maurizio Bianchi, for those of you who haven't been saved yet). These were first reissued in 1998 by EEs'T (a division of Alga Marghen) and are now back again. Symphony... was the first M.B. album, issued in 1981, at the gates of the industrial noise revolution (it was also reissued on CD in the U.S. on Hospital Productions). "ArcheoMB" is the title given to the complete reprint of old M.B. records and here is part 1. EEs'T Records and M.B. …

Another voyage into the inky blackness with the cosmos-loving Italians and another gem. MCIAA have gone from making dronescapes that were merely beautiful to listen to (merely!) to vast vistas of sound that seem to exert an almost gravitational pull into their depths. This opens with Roberto Opalio's parched vocal trances and the calming ching of Oriental bells and builds into a soporific sea of echoing guitar notes with bells rippling through it like a warm wind. For some reason, the line from …

2006 release ** After more than 25 years, the italian industrial pioneer Maurizio Bianchi goes back where it all started from. Using the four tapes released under the name Sacher-Pelz as source material, he resurrectshis very first monicker and leads you into an amazing journey throughdeep ambience, noisy soundscapes, true industrial rhythms, experimentaloutbursts and more than a touch of musique concrète. Also featured isthe first 'brand new' track from SP since 1980, showing the spirit isdefin…

an original copy of an awesome Scelsi LP, featuring Hô (1960) - Four melodies for solo voices. Pranam I (1972) - (In memory of the tragic loss of Jani and Sia Christou) for voice, 12 instruments and tape. Khoom (1962) - (Seven episodes of a story of love and death in a distant land) for voice and 6 instruments. Hô and Khoom were recorded in 1960-1962: Pranam I, in 1972.

The first complete recording of Giacinto Scelsi's music for double bass, played by Robert Black with guests on cello, harp, tam-tam and second bass, including Ko-Tha in Fernando Grillo's transcription.

Atrax Morgue was the nom de plume of Italian noisy type Marco Corbelli. This album from '96 is a blood and thunder, bass heavy assault on the senses. Cold and surgical powerelectronics inspired by sickness, diseases and forensic pathology.

"HELIX PARASITES": built on the idea of genetic modification via new channels, this is probably our most diversified and composite work so far. With a strong trend for rhythms and subliminal pipes, it has at the same time some of the most outlandish moments in digital psychedelia, where tons of events seem to happen in parallel. This is the voice of the incisive nucleus of newly born cells, extracted from the dreams of an artificial intelligence still to be conceived: lines of atomic maps draw t…

Recorded at Sentemo Records, Cessalto (Italy) on 30 January and 1-2-20 February 1993, except track 5 recorded live 4 May 1991 at Teatro Comunale, Ferrara (Italy). "Polifonica-Monodia-Ritmica", for 6 instruments and percussion, composed in 1951. "La Fabbrica Illuminata", for voice and tape, composed in 1964. "...sofferte onde serene..." for piano and tape, composed in 1976-77. "Post-Prae-Ludium Per Donau" for tuba and live electronics, composed in 1987. "Con Luigi Dallapiccola" for 6 percussionis…

LAST COPIES...This album has been released on both a double CD and on a boxset of three LP's, and it's long out of print now; the  music is a combination of ambient and industrial which can sometimes sound fit for a horror movie. Heartbeats, the chatter of children and ghostly voices swiftly floating around. Other times it's more spaced out, sad or just odd. A Hammond organ is present as a little link between his heavy metal/hard rock roots and this, and the whole work is pure drone masterpiece

"Clic" is released in 1974 and it is truly of those art-popping creations Battiato ever managed to do - there are full analogies naming it a best ever album, there are voices that appreciate its corrosive attitude under quite exhaustive portraits, everything being or not of a heads-up, since "Clic" needs to affirm a great response from the person who listens to it. All the fractured comparisons can become unremarkable, even if most of the previous solid works has lead to this entire full interes…

This is another one of Franco Battiato's amazing recordings from the 70's, and it features two extended pieces -- "ZA" and "Café Table Musik". "Za" is a long piece for solo piano, with lots of spare minimal moments, and haunting trancelike lines of chords that build very very slowly. It's a beautiful exercise in restraint, and the kind of haunting soundscape that Battiato is legendary for. "Café Table Musik" is a bit more complex, although it's still got minimal piano progressions as its core. T…

It is scored for two flutes, violin, viola, cello, bass clarinet and electric organ. This is a really beautiful piece of tranquil music, full of touching sweetness.

The first in a series of recordings devoted to the music of Giacinto Scelsi, devised by Stradivarius in conjunction with the Isabella Scelsi Foundation. The series comprises new, original recordings made in 2005, marking the hundredth anniversary of the composer's birth.

2008 release ** Lohengrin, Salvatore Sciarrino's "azione invisibile", is both a gloss on Wagner's opera and a sly debunking of it. It was conceived by its composer as an opera with action invisible, for one singer/actress who assumes all the charactersn Sciarrino's monodrama, based on one of Jules Laforgue's Moralités Légendaires, episodes from the story are viewed through the distinctly jaundiced eyes and ears of Elsa, the woman Lohengrin marries and then deserts. A single voice narrates and ta…

Sciarrino's work is avant-garde, and he is known for his use of isolated sonorities, extended playing techniques, frequent silences, and ironic or confrontational quotation of previous music (for instance, American pop music) or stories (such as in Lohengrin). His works include a large body of chamber music, including many pieces for wind instruments, five piano sonatas, and several operas or theatrical works: Da gelo a gelo, Infinito nero, Macbeth, Perseo ed Andromeda, Lohengrin, and Luci mie t…

Futurism with its dynamic force, youthful spirit, attention to innovation and a bit of Italian histrionism; the sixties with their hopeful and playful atmosphere and their crisp and catchy music; Italy with its beautiful sun, beaches, Mediterranean brightness and laxity; minimalism with its focus on the deepness of details; all the things happening in Bologna in the late seventies, among some of the newest and most creative experiences in film, performance, fashion and music. With these elements…

"an intoxicating blend of dark Ambient and steamy jazz. A vast, shifting blanket of atmospheric drones and textures, sourced in part from processed field recordings and occasionally spiced with samples ( a snippet of Ginsberg's Kaddish, some purring shortwave modulations) is sporadically supported by a supple, powerful rhythm section, but mostly left to billow darkly and malevolently in a way that recalls some of the colder moments of thei compatriots Larsen. The use of a brass section in such a…