ASPEC(T) - Waspnest

The complex genealogy of avant-garde projects and productions from the Naples underground continues – after "Agaspastik" by A Spirale, again assisted by Fratto9 – with the second album under the name Aspec(t). Where the first one ("El Obsceno Pajaro De La Noche") suffered from a certain thinness in its compositions, "Waspnest" pairs the force of a supernova with layers of brooding sound. The duo, Mimmo "SEC_" Napolitano and Mario Gabola, sound as if Suicide had set out to score not the alienation of new wave, but the devastation of a post-apocalypse.

After a sinister ouverture of grunts and electronic miasmas of every kind, Big Black-esque salvos ("People Of Refusal") and a primordial broth of musique concrete and radio frequencies ("Birdnest") lead into a repellent mass of sounds with no identity, pure organic growths with metallurgical undertones. Everything coalesces into industrial roars. The two sound even more sinister in the dying radiations of "GD Meets DP", which set up the very brief, screaming catastrophe that closes side one.

"Bottomless Nest" picks the symphony back up with a gothic ambience of factory noises and gurgles. "E.A. = Environmental Assassination" is fractured in two: first it exponentially piles up free-jazz, the industrial lava flows of Chrome and vocal avant-garde, then it lets only its reverberations settle, emitting faint pulsations (faithfully picked up by "Inner Dispossession", interrupted by violent gashes of feral distortion). The title track is a kind of elegy that accumulates negative sonic elements only to short-circuit all of a sudden.

Obsessed with the idea of non-language, of sonic outcasts, of communication's discarded scraps, the pair (who also perform as Asp/SEC_) have engineered an irrational labyrinth of screech, with gutted improvisations, dynamic tears, sounds that flare up and explode or leave virulent trails, a harmony reduced to hostile wasteland, episodes of a-verbal obscenity. Unfortunately, there's also a tangled, confused web of ideas, but – besides being a limitation – it's the consequence of a powerful (and perhaps slightly hasty) ambition that has very few precedents in Italian music. Credit for the industrial effects (including the piercing beats) goes to Gabola's feed-drums, as well as his sax. SEC_ splits his time between analogue (synth, radio, tapes) and digital (laptop). Followed by "Abattoir", a limited edition on Nuun Records.

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21/09/2011