Simon Balestrazzi - The Persistence of Memory

Simon Balestrazzi is one of the leading figures on the Italian post-industrial scene. In 1981 he formed T.A.C. (Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata), an experimental-minded outfit capable of blending industrial music and no-wave. Between 1986 and 1988 he created the dark-chamber ensemble Kino Glaz, while in 1991 he joins the Kirlian Camera. He has launched or taken part in various projects, and has also collaborated (among others) with figures and acts of the caliber of Paolo Angeli, Bron Y Aur, Mattia Coletti, Ikue Mori, Bruno Dorella, Tim Hodgkinson, Xabier Iriondo, Damo Suzuki e Z’ev. In the interview you're about to read, we spoke at length about his career and, in particular, about his latest solo album. Enjoy the read.

Simon, why is "the sky full of kites"?

Many of my titles come from visions I would call, even though the term is now sadly overused, "hypnagogic". Only afterwards do I try to rationalize them, in a way that's functional to my sonic ideas. In this case, since Daniele Serra's illustrations came before the writing of the tracks, what mattered to me was that the image should convey joy as well as unpredictability and a sense of latent threat. An organism (the kites) that's unstable and at the mercy of events. As a group they're almost still, but the internal trajectories are nervous and unpredictable. The gaze is turned to the sky, but what forces are stirring beneath/inside us? It's all about the fallibility of perception. Or maybe I've just been watching too much Lynch lately...

 

I'm torn. On one hand, it's territory I've felt at home in since the early 2000s. I think a lot of my past work (T.A.C. in the 2001-2005 period, Dream Weapon Ritual) already moved conceptually within an area where what mattered was the persistence of sonic memories, traces of songs never fully formed, out-of-focus memories, everything to do with the concept of atmosphere and emotional development... a bit of what D. Toop was reflecting on in his "Haunted Weather". Looking around, I appreciate the work of projects like Focus Group, The Caretaker, O.P.N. or the Italians Heroin In Tahiti or Cannibal Movie.

After all, it's an approach well suited to the present moment, which to me seems less like "the end of history" and more like "the age of the eternal present": more than a century of music and art history all equally available, unfiltered... and then I don't see that much of a difference between the Ghost Box family digging through the BBC's most esoteric library music and the Grateful Dead stretching "Death Have No Mercy" out toward infinity.

But then there's the flip side of the coin. This giving up on the "future" scares me, whether that means the search for new paths or simply new permutations not yet fully explored. I fear the à-la-Ariel Pink attitude: what really remains once the lo-fi haze dissolves? Maybe it's that Web 2.0 offspring attitude of flattening everything into sameness: making and sounding exactly like everyone else... identification and the finger scrolling to hit "like"...

 

I absolutely agree. But, without dragging in Reynolds and his latest "Retromania" (excellent, though I don't agree with all of it), it seems to me the problem needs to be reframed. In every era people have studied, stolen, recycled musical and cultural material from the past, and that's a perfectly natural process... but there was always a clear sense of the timeline. Sources were known, cited, paid homage to. Now that Web 2.0 is turning the latest generations from consumers into producer-consumers, the knowledge of how events unfolded over time, of music history's genres, of the evolution of the arts, is being lost. And on top of all that, the aggravating factor is the new way of consuming music: no longer reasonably attentive listening, but compulsive, bulimic, distracted listening, finger on YouTube's stop or fast-forward (always with an image in front of you), listening quality ranging from poor to nonexistent. People listening to music on their phones, where the only ghost of music left is a trace of a melodic line. The real, additional problem is that we musicians, journalists and so on keep asking ourselves whether this is an inevitable evolution, whether it isn't natural to declare the death of the album format, of recorded music, or even of the distinction between musician and listener... Bullshit! The reality is that this way of consuming music is the equivalent of eating at McDonald's: how many of us would waste brain cells debating whether McDonald's is simply a new, plausible frontier of food?

 

It's already happening. The scenario described by Lee Siegel in "Homo Interneticus" is already underway (by the way, what a dreadful title: the original is "Against The Machine", which packs a very different punch). I'm not a technosceptic like Siegel, but until we take a critical look at the internet's potential and acknowledge that it sits equidistant between a democratic agora and a totalitarian machine, the risk of a flatlined collective mind remains high... Goebbels would have loved the internet, I fear. My prediction, when it comes to music, is that as the age of those who experience it as an artistic experience keeps rising, we'll reach an irreparable split between commercial music (which has always renewed itself by courting the youth market, and which could be replaced by self-expressive activity - "long live Garageband"?) on one side, and music - if you'll allow me the term - "art music" on the other, which will move along channels increasingly similar to those of the visual arts (galleries, curation, multiples, valuations etc.). Or else some huge, unexpected wave of never-before-heard music will sweep everything away.

 

Could be, in fact it's very likely. But unlike other media and technologies that have become part of our lives over the last two centuries, this one seems to me the only one capable not so much of changing-broadening-influencing-channeling tastes and markets, but of transforming the very concept of merchandise, that is, of turning consumers themselves into merchandise for exchange, producers of themselves as merchandise, shifting the terms of the economic transaction, which raises several questions about who will "absorb" whom...

 

Absolutely yes. But I won't tell you more... It's not up to me to "explain" this work, it would strip away the mystery and the pleasure of immersing yourself in the sonic experience without filters. What I can tell you, though, is that from a strictly musical point of view it's a further step in my journey toward an electronic/organic sound where playing and real-time processing matter more than editing and programming. 

 

You're right, I too think it's a more "airy" work compared to my latest releases, even though many still consider it dark and claustrophobic. I think that, beneath the surface, you can also glimpse my love for Popol Vuh. This new approach of mine probably affects the overall atmosphere, although the generative processes behind "A Rainbow In My Mirror" weren't really all that different at heart. Will I come off looking like some aging freak or neo new-ager if I tell you the goal is to attune myself to the great universal vibration? Except entering through the back door, the one that runs through the darker, more dangerous path, because, to put it in David Lynch's words (and my friend Gianluca Becuzzi, who just quoted him in one of his own titles), "things are not what they seem"...

Actually, what's in exile is NeuroHabitat, my studio. It had already been moved to temporary locations several times since I relocated to Sardinia from New York, but for the past four years it's been completely dismantled. What hasn't been sold is partly boxed up and partly split between Parma and Cagliari, and I'm forced to shuttle back and forth because of it. I even have a small warehouse of my own, but I'm running up against the inertia and corruption of Italian public administration… I've got two appeals pending against the municipal technical office and I'm about to look for a good criminal lawyer. I'll probably be leaving Sardinia for good come late spring, and to be honest, while I'm at it, I'm thinking of leaving Italy too. I just can't stand living somewhere so uncivilized anymore. Nor can I stand the idea of still having a pair of main monitors Tannoy System 15 DMT II with Bryston amps left to rot for years in storage while I'm forced to work almost entirely on headphones. 

No. Maybe once. These days it mostly just bores me. You should never let yourself be seduced by that late-Romantic fascination with untouched nature, especially when you actually live and work in a city. The quality of life and the cultural level in Cagliari are getting worse year after year, and by now they're in freefall. That said, plenty of areas in Sardinia certainly do have a very strong magical or chthonic, primordial aura (esoteric, I really wouldn't say…) and, since 2003, with theensemble multimedia collective MOEX we've done sound installations for various sites such as necropolises, woods and nuragic settlements.

 

I didn't live in New York all that long, just a bit over a year. And I was mainly interested in and focused on what happens on the other side of the glass (of a recording studio). Still, NYC is a deeply rock-oriented city, but the great thing is that all sorts of things are hiding in its folds, and I had various contacts with figures from the Illbient scene, which back then – 1997/'98 – was among the most interesting things going. I also had a few contacts with the then-emerging weird folk scene, the Tower Recordings crowd, and I even ran into Tom Rapp (right after his return to the scene at Terrascope). However, my few musical projects never really took off (even though I narrowly missed out on a good deal with Thrill Jockey for my electro/dub duo Masse). I think I met more executiveproducers and sound engineers than musicians.

Well, given the titles and the themes, going after real ghosts rather than the virtual ones ofhauntology… Joking aside, with Corrado Altieri we focused on the by-now somewhat decomposed body of original industrial, to see if there was a way to make it current and escape the clichés of the genre, which loom large both for those coming from post-industrial, like us, and for those coming from the school of noise. It's not for me to say whether we hit the mark, but we're both very happy with the result. It was a pretty long process, in which we set ourselves few but essential rules: no laptop e processing digital, no rhythms other than pulses obtained from synths, no loop rhythmic ones. In fact the work is entirely made with analog synths from various generations (VCS3, Moody Babybox, Monotron), portable cassette recorders, small low-end samplers, chains of pedals in loop. Demanding, but fun. And always fitting into that idea of organic electronics I mentioned earlier.

I like 2000s noise, and the three bands you mention are, or have been, among my favourites. They've definitely listened to and absorbed both industrial and power-electronics from the late Seventies/early Eighties, but no, I don't see them as direct descendants. Besides, industrial in the strict sense was more a matter of strategies (shock tactics, situationism, appropriationism, recycling the historical avant-gardes within the popular) strongly tied to the socio-political climate of those years, more a network of heterogeneous artists than a musical genre, even if in the end a certain more or less identifiable sound did get codified.

Thank you, that's a huge compliment to me. Certainly in the early period, let's say '81-'87, we were part of a network fairly solid network that was pushing its boundaries towards the mail music and experimentation tout court. Also, especially in those years, T.A.C. kept a strong rock component leaning towards no-wave and avant-garde. Which surely made us an exception, but not that much of one. It's a long story, but what we considered post-industrial back then had a strong connection to an instrumental setup that wasn't strictly electronic: if you think about it, the early TG releases played a lot with pop and rock, S.P.K. debuted almost as a punk band and that tendency remains in their structures up to Leichenschrei, the Cabaret Voltaire had roots in the most minimal and “obtuse” psychedelia. Everyone used bass and guitar, even the Einsturzende Neubauten… If you look through the magazines of that time, I'm talking about the very early '80s, the bands considered post-industrial in Italy were T.A.C., Tasaday and F:A.R., all bands we'd now consider “atypical”. MB, on the other hand, besides not playing live and having anticipated everyone by a couple of years, was considered more power-electronics, and back then that wasn't the same thing. Same goes for other pioneers like Laxative Souls, Mauthausen Orchestra or Bruno Cossano. Or for Giancarlo Toniutti, one of the most interesting musicians ever active in Italy and never recognized enough, who came from a background in contemporary music. Then, around 1985/'86, a second wave arrived post, best represented over here, if you know what I mean, by Sigillum S, Lashtal and many others, and the concept of (post-)industrial sound began to change. I'd better stop before I turn this into a history lesson, you know, T.A.C.'s story has been going on for thirty years and, by the way, it's not necessarily over, quite the opposite… So, going back to the heart of your question, yes, pushing the boundaries between genres has always been one of my main goals - or rather, fighting the very concept of genre and steering T.A.C.'s sound towards hybrid, liminal territories.

Not at all, being compared to The Anti Group is always a pleasure. In '93 a lot had changed, pretty much everything really. The lineup had changed - I'd already been its only original member since 1987. The world and the music around us had changed... I've always liked to think of T.A.C. as the machine we took our name from: a tool for observing and analyzing the states, often pathological, occurring within an organism, and reproducing an electronic image of them, which in turn requires its own interpretation. Also, in mid-'89 Enrico Marani had begun collaborating with us, at the time in his first experience as a musician, and together we embarked on a very intense period of experimentation, with no limits on means or disciplines. Even though Enrico left T.A.C. as early as the beginning of '92, soon replaced by Angelo and Emilia of Kirlian Camera, all three releases from those years - so also "Pioggia Su Carne Di Cavallo" and "Hypnotischer Eden", plus a considerable number of original tracks scattered across compilations - were conceived during that three-year stretch of frantic work. The funny thing about "A Circle Of Limbs" is that at the time it was often mistaken for a collection of already-released tracks, whereas it was probably the most cohesive work, at least sonically, that we'd ever put together... The misunderstanding arose because we'd decided to "dismember" - hence the title - the album and use versions that were still, so to speak, raw and often recorded in one take, to meet the requests to take part in the many international compilations that kept flooding in on us while we were busy, in the studio, working in parallel on "Hypnotischer Eden" - which had actually been conceived and set in motion at least six months earlier. The two works were fairly mirror images of each other: the same elements at play, but where in one the ambient and ritual component absorbed the "melodic" structure, in the other the song form emerged from those same atmospheres, which were gradually pushed into the background.

It's going to be a pretty productive year. Before long, Silentes will put out the first release by Sarang, a new project made together with Enrico Marani. It's the first time we've worked together again since around '95. Also by spring, the reissue of T.A.C.'s second album (the first, self-titled vinyl from 1983) will come out on Officina Fonografica Italiana, to be followed by "Ouvrez Vos Auditifs Canaux". And then three floppy disks are about to come out, each containing one loop, for Santos Productions. I've just finished mixing an album with z'ev and another, a tribute to J. G. Ballard, made with Gianluca Becuzzi and Corrado Altieri, though both are still without a label. And I'm starting work on a new solo record and the next Dream Weapon Ritual... I'm also reorganizing myself to play live, both solo and with DWR and Candor Chasma. And then there are other collaborations taking shape, possible MoEx performances/installations, an all night concert to present at the next edition of Signal... In the midst of all this chaos, I'm also toying with the idea of bringing T.A.C. back on stage by the end of the year. Let's see what actually materializes...