The liner notes for Good Times in The End Times (yep he’s good with titles) begins with Australian composer Anthony Pateras asking Italian artist Valerio Tricoli “When does the Italian avant garde begin for you?” This pretty much encapsulates my understanding of Pateras – witty self depreciatingly ironic titles beneath which a fierce uncompromising intelligence and thirst for knowledge and the new bubbles away, occasionally exploding like a geyser of molten lava from a volcano – it’s beautiful and amazing, but also a little dangerous.
In some ways I see Pateras as an antidote to our dumbed down lowest common denominator society that’s filled with easy answers, where genres have become fashion decisions, and even experimental music has become littered with scenesters and copycats, where living the avant garde dream is as easy as changing your t-shirt. Whilst it’s not fair to foist that mantle on him, after all he’s probably only just chasing his muse, if truth be told each successive release on his own Immediata label has been increasingly iconoclastic, not feeling wedded to tradition, genre or, I don’t know, earth? This is a really good thing, as similar to each of his recent editions Good Times In The End Times doesn’t feel reactionary in any way, and it always seems like he knows what he’s doing even if the method or intent is not always immediately apparent to the listener.
Italian sound artist Valerio Tricoli has been referred to as a “tape torturer,” working obviously with tape, though also field recordings, creating dark sometimes highly disturbing electroacoustic compositions. He was a founding member of avant-rock group 3/4HadBeenEliminated and has previously worked with the likes of Thomas Ankersmit, Antoine Chessex, and Werner Dafeldecker. Last month he released Clonic Earth (Pan), which he described “as if all the debris left inside my loudspeakers have been ignited to expand into the ether, to find a justification at the principle of Chaos, or Cosmos alike.”
In this duo with Pateras he is working with Revox B77 reel to reel tape and voice, whilst Pateras is on prepared piano, pipe organ, harpsichord, doepfer a-100 analogue modular synthesizer. Together across three extended pieces they create a compelling, exotic soundscape that whilst possessing a strength and turbulence can also be restrained and minimal. The duo feel very much in tunes with each other, yet for the listener this is anything can happen territory, where you can’t be surprised because everything is surprising. Between song structure, texture, density, and duration, it’s very difficult to build an expectation about what should or could happen next. The duo are incredibly adept at maintaining a consistent sound world, which is particularly impressive because the world is so alien. Considering their disparate instrumentation they’re remarkably in tune with each other, providing each other plenty of space within their frequencies, yet also periodically coalescing where they become indistinguishable from each other.
The liner notes are an extended interview between Pateras and Tricoli where they discuss Tricoli’s childhood steeped in kidnappings and murder, how to inject sexual energy in music, the notion of compromise and restrictions, Pasolini and African feedback amongst numerous other topics. It’s just like the music, wide ranging tangential, unexpected and endlessly fascinating – even when it starts to get away from you.
