Destination Morgue VI

After last year's sonic assault, Destination Morgue no longer needed any confirmations or introductions. Now in its sixth year, and undoubtedly one of the most important Italian events for industrial-leaning music and beyond, it remains an essential appointment both for coming face to face with the vibrant history of the Italian experimental scene and for the projects born from its radioactive rubble.

The 2013 edition saw the Rome festival spread across two days packed with noise, feedback, blown synapses and chilling claustrophobia. A sinister electric thrill ran down the spine of anyone who never thought they'd see live performances by Iugula Thor or Laxative Souls (replaced at the last minute, due to unforeseen circumstances, by Spectre), LCHM and LYKE WAKE — emblematic and highly influential projects for Italian industrial sound, whose recordings are scattered throughout history, between self-produced tapes, vinyl records and precious few live appearances.

Unable to attend the first date due to the usual annoying work commitments, I had to place all my expectations on the second day, which featured Gianluca Becuzzi (founder of the legendary Limbo), Satanismo Calibro 9, Lyke Wake and Urna.

The night opened under the name Lyke Wake, Stefano Di Serio's dark ambient project, active since the late eighties and back in action since 2010. Di Serio's synth sound is a dense, moody magma that drags the visuals projected within it into itself. A socio-individual hypnosis accompanies it, unfolding as a thick path of claustrophobic horizons. A manic, restless spirit runs through this timeless music, which would continue in another form in the music of Gianluca Martucci and his project Urna.

Here the sound is sublimated into a ritual river of ethnic tones submerged under feedback and chaotic ambient layers. Behind him, the diabolical movements of pagan dances merge with a few, carefully measured, acoustic lines of bells, string instruments and hypnotic percussion.

A circularity bent into lysergic waves, into a cadenced litany of fearful prayer. An atmosphere quite different from the electro-acoustic experimentation of Gianluca Becuzzi, who presents an instrumental vision quite unlike his previous projects. Becuzzi is an artist who evolved out of an industrial background along different paths, more focused on electronics and experimentation (let's not forget the Kinetix project and his excellent collaborations with Fabio Orsi). The artist from Piombino unveils an abstract, cerebral set. Marked by a deconstructed rhythmic and minimal sounds, it was mirrored within sampled tones of ambient, concrete matrix, heterogeneous in tone, before grating into epileptic pain.

After a liturgical journey that had accompanied us through half the night, Becuzzi's noises and sounds translated our reality into an interlaced set of components, a fragmented vision of the soul and of sensation.

A strange, intriguing moment of perceptual disorientation, in which references and interpretation drifted apart from one another, creating the perfect ground for the final passage. The cult of death.

Satanismo Calibro 9 take the small spotlight dressed in black robes. Animal skulls and candles are other aesthetic elements of the sabbath about to begin. A dissonant, malevolent rite that will overwhelm space and time, leaving nothing around itself. A powerful, thunderous death-industrial set, dominated by subtle, sharp, percussive, overwhelming, magical litanies.

A black, magmatic din rises and slithers through organic feedback as the descent continues, saturating the entire room at Closer. The end is only apparent. A moment of stillness in which to regain a sense of a different, everyday, more superficial reality.

As we leave the noise behind, in that dark room that hosted Destination Morgue VI, consciousness tries to find an apparent silence, a stability. Deconstructed and dismantled like old factory gears, we'll have to be patient before returning to a mundane perception of events.

P.S: It's pointless and trite to say thanks to the Roman festival. The intelligence and consistency with which it carries forward its project are an important point of reference for a scene that in Italy has always struggled to come together in moments of sharing and support. See you in 2014!

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