SINISTRI - Free Pulse

In this writer's humble opinion, Starfuckers were, without doubt, one of the greatest Italian rock bands ever. Taking their cue from masters of auteur noise like Faust, Chrome and Royal Trux (who run through their early, unripe works), Roberto Bertacchini (perhaps the greatest Italian rock drummer among his contemporaries), Manuele Giannini (voice, amplifiers, echoplex, computer, sound effects) and Alessandro Bocci (sampler, synthesizer, mixer, turntables) built a discourse made of electronic avant-garde, aseptic and ultra-rarefied funk, expressionist dissonance, and musique concrète. In their major works, namely "Sinistri" (Underground, 1994) and "Infrantumi" (Lessness, 1997; Drunken Fish, 1998), the trio arrives at musical categories that are unnameable, unconscious, anarchic, and creative in the most extreme sense possible.

After an unfortunate album ("(Infinitive Sessions)"; Dbk Works, 2002) - even more forbidding and radical than its predecessors, but also saddled with clumsy promotion from the label - the band decided to push that discourse forward more decisively, introducing some significant improvements. First of all, a change of label, rediscovering Sweden's Häpna, who had already courted them back at the time of "Infrantumi" but had since grown and expanded, to produce and promote the new album, titled "Free Pulse", in a more targeted way. Then comes a new name for the band, borrowed directly from the title of the aforementioned 1994 album: Sinistri, as if to become more aware of their own potential while, at the same time, looking to the future with greater determination and intransigence.

There's also the valuable collaboration of one of the greatest sound engineers working today, Dino Bramanti (via real-time sampling-mixing-reprocessing software). Finally, there's the will to equip their work with a more decisive ideological-artistic line, through the drafting of a genuine programmatic manifesto, fully in keeping with the historic manifestos of 20th-century avant-gardes, including the "Manifesto Blanco" of spatialism inaugurated by Fontana's "cuts", and the one pertaining to Dogma 95 cinema (whose existence, at the time this review is being published, had only recently come to an end, cf.).

First of all, there's the renunciation of intention as a precondition for making music, and its return to "zero" level, to the maximum degree of non-intention: silence. This is the spirit that animates tracks like the opening "Smooth Fried Tk2", where the drums' magnetic groove, paired with a sordid background vibration, sets off springs of sonic reworking from subatomic frequencies. Or in "Holes In Between", where the conceptual art of crackles, splashes, intermittences, robotic sine waves, cosmic swarms and hums of various kinds (vaguely, Cage-ianly, like radio works) converses placidly with walls of silent pauses, before the bluesy intervention of the guitar shakes up the ascetic stasis with clusters of torn-off chords.

The second point of the manifesto reads: "What is determined is the exclusive product of the physical-acoustic circumstances specific to each performance; there is no predetermined structure, therefore no predetermined form." More consistent with this premise is "Black Vamp #1", announced by a hyper-cubist decomposition of the guitar: in harmony, in dynamics, and in stereo imaging alike, Sinistri proceed through continuous random, anti-programmatic phase-shifts, asynchronies (Bramanti's digital timbres almost taking on a rhythmic function), rhythmic dysfunctions (the drums proceeding in a kind of limping, syncopated trance state) and vivisection devices largely derived from "total" improvisation, entrusted to the specific acoustics of the instruments and the sound-reprocessing apparatus. But also in the ultrasound disturbed by electronic mutterings of "Pre-Verb Fried Funk" - almost a phantasmagoric dub - with a weave of cut-up guitar chords (which turns into noise discharge in an electrostatic flow), the band attempts to translate this concept into composition.

According to the third point, "Playing amplified music means subtracting sounds from noise rather than adding sounds to silence." This is, in truth, a Michelangelo-esque concept of the "non-finito" that animates pieces like "Cold Fried Tk4", built on a mutual unfolding of anti-rhythms that perhaps owes much to the hushed minimalism of Christian Wolff's repetitions, pauses and subliminal sounds, as well as to the angry destructuring of certain no wave, or the broadly funky guitar timbres borrowed from the most acidic John McLaughlin on "Bluesplex Pt. 1", laid out over the low vibrations of the echoplex, forming an anthology of fragments maimed and distorted at the very moment of their birth. Also notable is "Red Angular Feelin'", with its interweaving of radio frequencies and gamma rays, Bertacchini's hi-hat drumming losing itself in universal void, while once again Cage-ian galaxies stage a kind of serial mini-concerto.

In the fourth and final point of the manifesto, Sinistri argue that "the essence of music is time, not sound", and that therefore it "does not consist of multiple sounds distributed across a uniform time, but of a single sound bouncing across a multiple time." "Ampstone" is the track that best exemplifies this postulate. The usual stumbling (yet also unsettling) drums form the backdrop to deliberately redundant atmospheric sounds. Here Sinistri reach a stroke of genius, through the record's only vocal line (courtesy of Giannini): "Sound/ Alone/ That vibrates/ Bends/ And Bounces/ In this something [...]". It's a clear surplus of meaning, one that doubles the redundancy of the sounds, and thus functions on multiple registers: illustrative, referential, conative.

It isn't illuminating on the evolutionary front, where the band does plant a few stakes without managing to build a fence around them, but the finishing touches, the atonal feelings, and the amalgam of sonic fluidity are more than sufficient. Excellent work from Dino Bramanti, effective in choosing both the ecstatic and the disorienting details of the digital, acoustic or electrified sources, and in turning them - warped - into the relentless, unbroken continuum of fragmentation. The album was preceded by a series of tracks not included in the final tracklist, distributed online in compressed mp3 format or included on compilations such as "Cottage Industrial vol. 3" (CD-R Hambug, 2004) and "Allegorical Power Series vol. VII" (Antiopic, 2003). Subtitle: "Non-metric music by ex-Starfuckers".

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30/04/2026