SIMM – Visitor (Ohm Resistance)

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SIMM

In the late nineties, Eraldo Bernocchi released numerous tracks under the name SIMM, strewn about a variety of compilations and one lone album. A masterpiece of club-footed, dark dub, Welcome had all the congeniality of a desolate Gothic castle shrouded in fog in some unmapped region of Transylvania. Suddenly, all these years later, comes a sophomore full-length, with the equally double-edged noir title Visitor. Slotting in perfectly beside collaborations with Mick Harris and Bill Laswell, including the trio´s Equations of Eternity, SIMM stares at you with sliver-of-grey-sky eyes and snarls, “Who are you?” And you know your life depends on the answer.

Bernocchi paints with fifty shades of black. A low tempo illbient banished to the sewers that has grown red and raw in tooth and claw, its bass growls and drools, the beats are magnificent and the melodies are chilling. A lone piano is more melancholy than Dürer´s angel. The vocal samples are scary. ´Revenge is Faith´ is in a mood so foul and steely, it could kick over boxcars. ´Retribution´ delivers Shylock´s ´Hath not a Jew´ speech as evilly as his Elizabethan audience craved. The closing ´Sky Eater´, while possibly the slowest track on the album, is also somehow the lightest. Perhaps this time, the visitor lived to continue on his way.

Among his vast output – his noise band Sigillum S, his Tibetan excursions, his new label RareNoise, whose roster includes numerous new Bernocchi projects (the undersigned´s favourite being Metallic Taste of Blood) – I have a soft spot – the place the blade entered just beneath my shoulder blade – for this creepy drum programming´n´bass. Visitor is barely different from Welcome, even the cover art is more or less the same, but who would want Universal´s Frankenstein to change suits? Horripilation music.

Stephen Fruitman

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About Author

Born and raised in Toronto, Stephen Fruitman has been living in northern Sweden lo these past thirty years. Writing and lecturing about art and culture as an historian of ideas since the early nineties, his articles have appeared in an number of international publications. He is also a contributing editor at Igloo Magazine.

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