NUN - Neuronale

Amid mimeographed flyers championing anarcho-revolutionary struggles and leaflets calling for strikes outside the gates of Fiat Mirafiori, the city of Turin has always been in constant motion. The music scene was no exception, closely attuned to what was happening across the Channel and beyond. We're in the early '80s: punk's echoes, new wave and electronics were starting to knock at the minds of Turin's youth, including those belonging to the underground industrial and experimental world. Among them was Ezio Albrile, at the time a young and committed advocate of extreme militarism, today a renowned historian of ancient world religions and one of the leading scholars in the field of Gnostic spirituality. Albrile had already made a musical appearance with Psychopathic Blossom, an industrial/experimental project born at school desks and made up of two other young Turin natives, though it remained confined to a handful of tapes, with no label behind it, and a few plays on local alternative radio stations. After that, barely in his twenties, he devoted himself to the solo project Nun, an acronym of the German Nacht Und Nebel ("Night and Fog"), the name given to German political prisoners awaiting execution during the Second World War.

His output amounts to very few, rare releases: the first self-produced work (1983-1984) was a 7-inch vinyl featuring the tracks "Riv-Skf" (after the well-known ball-bearing factory) on side A and "Margine" on side B. Other compositions of his ended up on various compilation tapes of the era: "Orgonica" came out in 1984 on the French label Insane Music, run by Alain Neffe (Pseudo Code, Bene Gesserit, Human Flesh); "Extracts From 'Controtempo β'" was released in 1986 on the Milan-based ADN (Tasaday, Doxa Sinistra, Cranioclast), and that same year also saw the release of "Extract From Vermilion Sands" and "Extract From The Disaster Area" on the British label Anal Probe.

Today, through an excellent work of archival recovery, Menstrual Recordings has simply gathered all these productions into the album "Neuronale", a kind of retrospective that perhaps aims to shed light on how the electro-experimental scene was evolving in Italy (what equipment was used and what the end result sounded like) through the contribution of lesser-known underground figures like Ezio Albrile, who should be regarded neither as an icon of industrial music on the level of Maurizio Bianchi, nor as an experimenter of the highest order.

Albrile's approach has been described as "household-appliance industrial music". These are indeed homespun compositions of unconventional, synthetic experimental noise, made with old reel-to-reel recorders and various analogue gear. The goal is to obsess, a trait found in each of the six tracks on "Neuronale". Linear yet percussive noises ("Riv-Skf"), well handled, dictate the rhythm, striving through imperceptible clock-hand ticks and the hum of ultrasonic resonances ("Margine") to draw the listener in, pushing them to the edge of a hypnotic trance. The hammering, almost tribal sound effects directly stimulate the brain, exciting it so that it fires electrical impulses — brief discharges of intangible voltage that travel the length of the sympathetic nervous system and reach the eyeballs, thus closing the circuit for good.

"Neuronale" is a record that fires the imagination. You could picture yourself at home, dressed in a blue factory worker's overalls (ideally an Skf one), vainly trying to retune the VHF frequency of your old black-and-white TV set with the fine-tuning knob.

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02/07/2011