MB is noise pioneer Maurizio Bianchi, here working with Andrea Ics Ferraris on Vir-uz, an examination of the Biblical Job as exemplifying “praiseworthy perseverance in suffering’. Featuring field recordings from the Jewish cemetery of Alessandria, this is a dark, dense and difficult recording marked by muffled microphone buzz, fizzing electricity and distortion.
Most individual pieces follow a standard, if vague and somewhat choppy, build-plateaux-decay structure, as foggy hum grows to a growl, granular hiss peaks and breaks up, and distant clanks, tings and whirrs puncture the backdrop like hail upon a windshield. The opening title work douses reverb over a clanky morse-code blip, tapped out on a rusted fence, while the sound of a train echoing through a subway adds to the drone and far off bells toll ominously.
On “Severe Brovata’ the sound of turned soil and cemetery stone is cut up by the roar of a motorboat, seagulls adding a predatory rather than bucolic touch. “Falsaj Amicoj Sugestis’ and “Pli Ol La Komencajn’ both foreground an artful fumbling with live circuitry, sparks lighting against dead grey metal, but these moments are no less gloomy and opaque. This is difficult music to penetrate but that is clearly the intention, like following grains in magnified waves of distortion.
Joshua Meggitt
