condition (record/cover): NM / NM

Edition of 202 copies with silk-screened insert.

A vinyl collaboration issued on the Norwegian micro-label TIBProd., operated out of Stavanger by Jan-M. Iversen since 2003. Segmenti A + B pairs two extended pieces of roughly eighteen minutes each, credited jointly to Maurizio Bianchi and the drone project Les Champs Magnétiques (helmed by Yvan Battaglia). The two composed together; Battaglia handled arrangement, effects, and mix.

Les Champs Magnétiques borrows its name from the 1920 proto-Surrealist text by André Breton and Philippe Soupault, an early experiment in automatic writing. The reference is apt. Bianchi's own catalogue, which began under the Sacher-Pelz tapes in 1979 and detonated with Symphony For A Genocide on Nigel Ayers's Sterile Records in 1981, has always operated at the intersection of surrealist chance and Italian industrial severity. The man from Pomponesco has long been one of the continent's most unmoored electronic composers, one for whom mechanical process and psychic automatism are hard to tell apart.

The two segmenti unspool slow, heavy layers of tape-saturated drone, ringing metal, and granular bursts. Nothing here resembles the pitiless noise of Bianchi's early LPs, nor the devotional late-career pieces. This is a weightier, ambient-adjacent Bianchi, collaborating rather than declaiming, letting Battaglia's engineering frame the raw material into cathedral-scale acoustic chambers. Sleeve photograph by Teresa Bianchi, cover design by Tzesne. A small-run artifact, as most post-2000 Bianchi releases are, and one of the more seductive of his recent collaborations.