Neptune

Although they've been active for quite some time with CD-Rs and various self-releases, Neptune were revealed to the Italian audience by last year's excellent "Gong Lake". On that album, released on the prestigious Table Of Elements, the Boston outfit managed to forge a personal blend of industrial music and percussive, hallucinatory new wave, somewhere between Z’ev and early Einsturzende Neubauten, with sounds drawn from orthodoxly self-built instrumentation. Back then, curiosity about seeing the band live was pretty high, and the chance came up in Naples thanks to the organization of Wakeupandream. What can we say? Well, even the venue itself, located in one of the most beautiful areas of Naples, already hinted at a fair share of mental illness, self-built as well… Picture a cramped, claustrophobic nook, sunk down at basement level, with pipes popping up where you'd least expect them, and an acoustic like being inside a vacuum-sealed tin…

In short, more than a concert hall, it looked like the engine room of a ship. And yet it turned out to be exactly the right setting, given what the band had to offer. Indeed, Neptune brought onto the stage a series of (insanely) self-built instruments, which looked like torture toys straight out of Tsukamoto's Tetsuo. Metal guitars used as percussion, telephones hooked up to amplifiers, strange silvery contraptions with unusual sounds, and, yes, the venue itself and its metal protrusions used in turn as a noise-making instrument.

The band's impact was pretty devastating. The clatter of the percussion – set up as the driving force of the sound – bounced off the venue's walls like a stray bullet, with a drummer pounding away so furiously he seemed at one point about to collapse from exhaustion. And a sound that poured out both metallic and visceral at once, like a blade voluptuously sinking into rotting flesh. It was hard to endure listening to it continuously, but some seemed to manage. Not the undersigned, who stepped out for air at least twice.

Having said that, in the end the show was still "pleasantly unpleasant" and above all distinctive, the studio albums sound less jagged, partly due to the help of some fifth-grade-level electronics (or something resembling that) which makes this music rounder but also less definable.

Photo by Pietro Previti

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