Music Reviews

cover
Artist: Gianluca Becuzzi
Title: Trax To Trax
Format: 2CD (double CD)
Label: Silentes
Rated: *****
Most of devoted fans of this master from Italian avant-electronics scene should already know many tracks which have been included in this double-cd collection of recordings and every connoisseur of that scene should immediately realize the connection between its title and the glorious Italian tape label Trax by mail artist, music critic and expert on countercultures Vittore Baroni and the late lamented eclectic artistic Piermario Ciani. The most "flamboyant" tracks - due to their remarkable length - perfectly exemplify the network-based operational philosophy of Trax: the first one is the long-lasting, estranging and really evocative "Rednight", inspired by the notorious novel "Cities of the Red Night" by William S.Burroughs and partially based on the original version, a collage of edits, samples, spoken words, overdubbing and noises from different artists and musicians, who took part to the first Trax convention, held in Bertiolo in 1982, having recourse to a plenty of techniques such as cut-up or detournement, which have largely been applied to avantgarde and industrial releases of that age; the second one is "Where Angels Can't Land", representing in Becuzzi's own words "a sort of semi-controlled application of the aleatory theories of John Cage" for the way this track has been assembled, whereas each involved artist/musician - Simon Balestrazzi, Fabio Orsi, Nigel Ayers (Nocturnal Emissions), Pietro Riparbelli (K11) and Rod Summers (VEC Audio) - recorded a track for each base they received from the central operational unit (Becuzzi himself), which organised all sonic contributions according to a sort of radial scheme, where the peripheral units "interacts" only with the central one. Other tracks are equally interesting: halved track "All Frontiers Anthem" easily collides with listener's eardrum with the combination of heavy thumps and very piercing acute sounds, while "Unspeakable" is the moment when post-industrial languages sounds like winking at old-fashioned dark (and even folk...) tastes. The only unreleased track, the final "Untouchable", is an immersive dark-ambient track, where Becuzzi inserts buzzing and cutting sounds into a spooky and somewhat ghastly magmatic pool.


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