MAURIZIO BIANCHI

Merry Go Round music from Hell!

Electronic Noise composer Mauricio Bianchi's 1980 "Mectpyo/Blut"consists of two 40 minutes + - each, single compositions. Part A -" Maidanek Bakterium & Musique Bel", is an intense industrial "drone" like ride, that surely is the winner between both compositions. It carries the industrial experimental scope of Fripp & Eno's, 1973, "No Pussyfooting" and Lou Reed's first 1975 "Metal Machine Music" uncompromising noise like sublimination. This is the highlight, I repeat of this project.

On the other hand part B - "Mutant Brain & Mord Bahnhof", things get quiet boring. Maybe he was trying on the Conrad Schnitzler approach of raw experimentation, but unlike CON, who always applied the experimentation to his songwriting, MB stays short and proposes an over indulgent 40 minute long composition, dedicated to himself playing and recording his quiet boring, child like session of nothing relevant or original, composition wise of course.

UNEVEN, yet side A is a real no-frills, frantic, factory machine like, hypnotic, but consciously unappealing ride, well worth the waiting line.

Therefore ***3 "good but half short of essential" PA stars.

A terrific album of late night Victorian era haunted house scariness. This is somewhat reminiscent of David Lynch's 'Eraserhead' and the 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre' soundtracks.

It's business as usual with Maurizio Bianchi where he utilises a beatless, guitarless swathing mass of reverberated electronics that paved the way for many Industrial bands that would follow.

What sets this one apart from his other recordings is the fact that it sounds SO damn spooky from beginning to end. You can almost hear the wails of the dead reaching out to grab your face 'Zombie Flesh Eaters' style.

'The Plain Truth' uses the same technology and keyboards as preceding albums. This one, however stands out from the rest in that there's some semblance of tune throughout, particularly on the second part. It's still a grizzly, unrefined and ugly recording using only highly primitive analogue treated keyboards and other unidentifiable objects.

This could have been the perfect soundtrack to HP Lovecraft's 'At the Mountains of madness' novel. It's a cold, alien and evil sounding recording which will sound great being played late at night, particularly if there's banks of fog everywhere.

This is the best in his entire catalogue followed by 'Symphony for a Genocide'.

'Endometrio' is an electronic bludgeoning assault on the senses. It is however a somewhat disappointing album from Maurizio Bianchi during his most prolific and best period. There's not much going on in these slabs of industrial noise that will hold your attention.

Huge, queasy grumbling keyboards are affected with an array of delay effects that make you think Norman Bates is having a one man party wearing a bobble hat and blowing a tooter before murdering Janet Leigh in the bathroom in 'Psycho'. Admittedly it's an ominous and thoroughly spooky album, but it unfortunately falls flat due to the simple fact that there isn't much going on between all the electronic noisescapes.

It's all too blunt and one dimensional to have any real impact. It's good enough if you're in the the mood for some blood letting, but quite frankly I'm not. I'm going through a World War One book reading trauma just now and this music just makes me feel sick.

Go for 'Armaghedon' or 'Symphony for a Genocide' if you're new to this artist. These are far better examples of Bianchi's output.

Ugly sound sculptures reflecting on the human condition

Still within the confines of the boot shaped country, this review does however take a huge u-turn musically and goes from the prodigal rock fires of classic RPI, to the eroding harshness of electronic pioneer Maurizio Bianchi. His 1981 release Symphony for a Genocide has become quite the cult artefact these days, and whether by way of it's unfriendly jaggedy appearance or indeed for its reputation for being the progressive electronic album equivalent to Trout Mask Replica, it continues to remain a highly sought out item among the more mad electrolytes. The two albums obviously bear no resemblance to each other whatsoever, but there's a deliberate insanity and impossibly difficult aura surrounding both, which has most music writers pulling out their teeth - talking about anti-music and the emperor's new clothes.

I am very open to experiments, also the completely bonkers ones, but in order for me to really get into them, there needs to be some form of soul or passion behind. So naturally when Maurizio Bianchi decided to refrain from any such qualities in order to relegate the grim fear and purgatorial evil of the death camps of W.W.ll, I find myself equally mystified by the complete lack of melody and concord, and the fact that nothing on the album seems even remotely listenable.

Sounding like a soundtrack to an industrious slaughterhouse with cold robotic machine noises, Symphony for a Genocide does succeed in its quest for authentic apocalyptic music. It almost supersedes it's goal. To me personally, this album is far better on recollection. The more time that passes between each listen of it, the more strangely enamoured with the very idea behind the album I seem to get - an idea that rivals even the most frightening of war museums in terms of portraying the unthinkable horror of the holocaust. Then I put the album on and reach halfway, before my brain thirsts for feel.....

The synths on this colossus of a record are uniquely ugly. That's the first thing you'll probably pick up on. Without a milligram of melody they sound like old arcade games music gone berserk. Corroding, slicing, pulverising their way through your speakers the sheer impact of them will either have you nurturing strange erotic thoughts about skips and large oil tankers, or perhaps more likely make your skin crawl.

On the other hand, you have to give Bianchi credit for having the balls to release this thing. While there'd been a number of abstract personalities on the progressive electronic scene, Maurizio took what Conrad Schnitzler flirted around with in an embryonic phase and cultivated it, or indeed tortured the hell out of it, subsequently coming up with this horrific industrial voyage through one of mankind's darkest chapters.

So there you have it: one of the most unique, unlistenable and memorable records ever made. I am thrilled to have it in my collection, don't get me wrong - while I detest the music, I adore the notion of having physical remnants of the outer extremities of the forever winding age old music tree.

'Armaghedon' sounds remarkably like the original 'Texas Chainsaw Massacre'. In particular, that part where the girl stumbles into the living room of the psycopaths where she is surrounded by bones, skulls and feathers. 'Armaghedon' is a bit smoother round the edges simply because the recording technology is poorer. This only adds to the sense of dread and ominousness. It's almost like it could have been recorded 100 years ago.

Once again Maurizio Bianchi is entirely electronic and squeezes and squashes all sounds through various delay and echo filters creating a terrifying atmosphere if listened to with the lights off. There are some faint semblances of voice on part two but they're so distorted they're almost unrecognisable as emanating from a human larynx.

'Armaghedon' may remind listeners of the old early 80's video nasty soundtracks too. It's a dirty, malignant sound, very much of its time.

Despite being his umpteenth album (and his last for eight years), the quality hasn't really improved in terms of sound. It's all muffled and distorted beyond distinction using his well worn analogue keyboards.

I've got a lot of time for albums like this. 'Armaghedon' is murder music - the kind of stuff you could imagine Ted Bundy or Jeffrey Dahmer listening to whilst trying to lighten up their evenings off.

Grinding and beautiful industrial bliss.

Maurizio Bianchi is one of the most widely known and revered architects of noise music during its inception as a genre, and Regel is a great example for why. The perpetual grinding and piercing resonances that wave in and out of focus on top of metallic drones on "Part 1" can be comparable to a much darker and noisier Conrad Schnitzler or Bernard Parmegiani, and seems like an obvious prototype for the more extremist sounds of Merzbow and The Cherry Point.

"Part 2" is a bit different, showing signs of what is just barely a despondent melody that beeps- and-boops its way along a ~24 minute trajectory across a much more emptier grinding drone than was present on the first track. The constant waving of pitch in the primary industrial drone creates an effect that is almost like being abducted into the music. "Acido Prussico" is a relatively shorter track that follows the emptier type of metallic drone as in the previous track, but the gloomy melodic portion is replaced by a high-pitched whistling resonance. A good track but nothing special for Bianchi, and is most like some of the best Bernard Parmegiani if not just a little bit more involved.

Besides Regel being primarily an experimental electronic noise album, it's not exactly harsh in the sense that it is painful to listen to (not like some of Aube's work); it's more harsh by sheer density and complexity than anything else, and really is quite relaxing once you allow yourself to focus entirely on the layers and layers of metallic sound effects. As hypnotizing as it is dark, this album somehow never crosses the line toward the morose or malevolent; I'd have to assume that the purpose of this album is to induce a metallic hypnotic state for the listener.

Regel should appeal to fans of older noisy electronic artists such as Schnitzler and Parmegiani but also to fans of the modern, more harsh developments in the genre such as Merzbow and Aube. The harshness level of this album when compared to some of the newer Japanese school makes this seem like easy listening, but it is in all honesty a rather soothing album that should please anyone who is into hypnotizing, enigmatic, experimental music.

This version of 'Symphony for a Genocide' is the re-mastered one. Its sharper and more harsh in sound than the 'Dark Vinyl' CD I own from the early 90's which sounds far murkier and darker - almost as though your listening to it at the bottom of a mine-shaft. The clean up job has almost been too good, sterilising the overall dirtiness of the recording.

This is probably my favourite 'Industrial Noise / Drone' cd of all time. A genre I pretty much dislike these days. Is it all part of growing older? I used to love Controlled Bleeding, Dissecting Table, Merzbow etc, but find it all a bit hard to take these days.

'Symphony for a Genocide' is purely electronic, intensely claustrophobic and has a faint semblance of a couple of tunes attached to it. Everything sounds grumbly and whiney and is overflowing with delay and reverb which leads to a very creepy and atmospherically evil recording. Brilliant! Just the kind of stuff I like!

There's nothing remotely 'Prog' about this album nor any other MB album, but it's without doubt his best and is the one Electronic, Noise, Drone recording I've always got time for.

Petrify your neighbours by playing this in the middle of the night. They'll think Fred and Rose West have moved in.

The kind of music that makes you think that there's faces staring at you through windows...

— First review of this album —

Maurizio Bianchi was one of the earliest proponents of industrial electronic music back at the end of the 70's. After the rawest-noisy electronic injections of his first manifests (notably under the pseudonym Sacher Pelz), he launched the so called trancey-industrial drone ambient scene (with pionnering works such as The Plain Truth, 1983). Today his releases include composite synthetic timbres, various rotative loops and complex meditative ambiences (A.MB iehn tale, 2005; Valley of deep shadows, 2008) to name a few. Published during the last years Blut Und Nebel is a rare collection of re-issued (remixed) pieces taken from M.B early electronics. It includes various taped materials with a wide ranging collage sounds. The textural ambiences are impressively corrosive-abrasive punctuated by vivid echoing sounds, abstract metallic harmonies. A few pieces include continuous sound form experiments. The sonic content is evident and the atmosphere is evocative, exploring informal interactive spheres. A difficult listening but a must have for fans of low-powered-suspended electronic music.

R.C.E is a dense neurotic-electronic celebration with winter-like, cold and dry tempers shaped by religious affinities. This album is structured by a disintegrated pianoforte, transversal electronic obliteration and foggy dronescapes. This is an honest compromise, an achieve balance between M.B's most radical, subversive noisy experimentats and delicate meditative synthesised excursions. R.C.E opens this detached misanthropic march with a furious buzzing noisy ambience (R.C.E. 1). The second piece is much more suspenseful and ethereal featuring virtuous droning stratification in a symbiotic system of beauty and harmony. R.C.E 3 represents the creative pinnacle of the album. It's made up of large, moving, unearthy soundscapes enveloped in doom-like electronic frequencies, metallic-industrial-confused noises and punctuated by furiously elegiac, perpetually mobile piano chords. A unique articulation of sounds that forms M.B musical signature. Ambiguous, antagonistic and melancholic transportation.

Released in 2007, Nefelodhis is a concept album by Maurizo BIANCHI in collaboration with the abstract impressionist post rockin' ensemble SPARKLE IN GREY (featuring Matteo UGGERI on electronics, Alberto CAROZZI on guitars, Cristiano LUPO on various instruments and Franz KROSTOPOVIC on violin). In the Greek terminology Nefelodhis means "cloudiness". The concept of the album opens on poetical-promethean-mercurian images in relation with vertiginous spiritual states and ascentional horizons. The sound experiments and the pleaseantly suspensfully instrumental melodies perfectly illustrate the conceptual background of the project. Each musical piece metaphorically represents direct and dynamical images of clouds (stratus, cumulum, nibulus...). The poetical inspiration of these natural manifestations was already approached by classic writters as Goethe, Rilke or Whitman. Nefelodhis gives to these intimate reveries a poetical-musical incarnation. The opening piece starts with textural-detached and resonating guitar strings progressively covered by dense, shimmering drone divine. The second composition offers wonderful-doom bass laments with repetitious, ecstatic violin dissonances and nervous noisy effects. A deep, serene and arctic atmosphere prevails. The three following pieces feature superb micro-tonal ambient experiments with an alternance of menacing, tremendous echoes and contemplative-cosmical effects. Last cloud is a spendid, elegiac and melancholic piece dominated by beatific organic sounds and dreamy like minimal guitars. An etheral soundscape which reveals the infinite pleasure to live in an agglomeration of aerian images and enchanting metamorphosis. The album closes with a slow-moving, unearthy synthscape.Voluptuous, pure cinematic beauty. Nefelodhis is a ravisishing abstract trip that convice us that the supreme form of solitude is in the aerian-vertical universe. Timeless masterpiece.