Maurizio Bianchi is an Italian pioneer of
industrial music and dark
ambient, originating from Milan. Bianchi was inspired by the music of
Tangerine Dream, Conrad Schnitzler and
Throbbing Gristle. He wrote about music for Italian magazines before beginning to release his own cassettes under the name of
Sacher-Pelz in August 1979. He released four cassettes as Sacher-Pelz before switching to his own name or simply "
MB" in 1980. Bianchi corresponded with many of the key players in the industrial music and
noise music scenes including
Merzbow, GX Jupitter-Larsen, SPK, Nigel Ayers of
Nocturnal Emissions and
William Bennett of
Whitehouse. After this exchange of letters and music, his first LPs were released in 1981.
Symphony For A Genocide was released on Nigel Ayers'
Sterile Records label after Bianchi had sent Ayers the money to press it. Each track on the LP was named after a Nazi extermination camp. The cover featured photographs of the Auschwitz Orchestra, a group of concentration camp prisoners who were forced to play classical music as people were herded into the gas chambers. The back cover included the text "The moral of this work: the past punishment is the inevitable blindness of the present".