SIMON BALESTRAZZI - A Rainbow In My Mirror

Neurohabitat is what Simon Balestrazzi has named his main website, conceived not so much as a virtual showcase but as a dark repository where anguish can reside and deep psychological states and fears can be given shape.

There aren't many Italian artists who have managed to carve out an important space on that stage whose extreme poles, within a perverse and diseased sonic system, are on one side industrial music, understood in its rawest form, and on the other experimental electronics.

Balestrazzi, today an established musician, producer and sound engineer, is one of those who in recent years has focused on composing soundtracks for a variety of fields, from film to theatre, from dance to advertising.

Active since the very early '80s, much like another equally enigmatic and borderline artist, Maurizio Bianchi — though the latter leans more towards typically industrial noise shades — he has made a name for himself through sonic experiments created with, or derived from, self-built instruments, and through the rough manipulation of tape recorders, while co-founding T.A.C. (Tomografia Assiale Computerizzata), a historic Italian band devoted to acoustic/electronic and post-industrial experimentation, which would go on to become his main form of sonic expression.

To his credit, then, is a remarkable discography, spread over the years between the aforementioned T.A.C. (around twelve official albums), Kirlian Camera, Kino Glaz and Dream Weapon Ritual, plus numerous and varied collaborations ranging from Limbo to Forbici Di Manitù. Only once before this current release, back in 2009, did a work come out under his own name, titled "The Darkest Holler", released as a free download for the Italian label Radical Matters.

This second release, "A Rainbow In My Mirror", available on CD through the newly founded independent label Magick With Tears (a sub-label of TiConZero, created and founded by Sardinian electro-experimental composer Alessandro Olla), is presented in a limited edition of just 474 copies, in a delightful cardboard packaging, pocket-booklet style, with excellently curated graphics and artwork.

This mini-album is made up of a single track lasting just over twenty-one minutes in total. It was recorded live in two separate but mirrored sessions, between September 2009 and March 2010, that is on the spring and autumn equinox, two dates distant from each other yet bound by the same celestial, mystical or neurological point of reference. This is probably where the title of the work comes from: a rainbow, an iris of similar or near-similar sounds divided by a mirror, an image, a reflection that both opposes and attracts itself.

Through field recording manipulations, intersecting Korg Ms-10 synthesizers with a variety of unconventional acoustic instrumentation, and fully exploiting the raw totality of the sounds that emerge, Balestrazzi manages to achieve delirious, psychotic and psychedelic harmonic compositions, pulsing and tubular, steeped in the worst kind of tribal mysticism: hints of demonic calls, faint and disjointed voices penetrate the head, drilling through the skull with a small-diameter bit. The ultimate goal seems to be to flay and tear apart the primary auditory cortex.

Lashing metallic sonic barriers alternate with sharp echoes of analogue manipulations (keyboards and small organs), trying to guide the listener towards a mixed dimension of ecstasy and terror. A perfect electroacoustic anaesthetic, an alienating journey, the annulment of any bond with space and time.

Ready in line with your magnetic pass, waiting for your turn to cross the main entrance — this time not the gates of hell, but of the worst of the Krupp steelworks — knock on the door of your own neural habitat and ask to be let out; don't be afraid and don't fear getting lost, you're carrying the right chemical-synthetic blend, and you can't go wrong.

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14/06/2011