PHARM - Pharm

A Rome-based outfit with a recent history of multimedia experiments and high-profile collaborations, Pharm finally make their debut in 2012 with an album that revives the happiest moments of early Calla: the a-musical techniques, the flirtations with silence, and the steady stripping-away of atmosphere.

Concessions to traditional composition are rare, and song form vanishes into thin air. "Sorbetto" shatters a whirling jazz-rock jam into a shapeless alien thicket, while "L'africano" imports the instrumental elements of Area's "Arbeit Macht Frei" — from electronic chaos to ethnic sax to the ostinato of the rhythm section — making good use of loops to drive the mood, and closing with a free-jazz crescendo.

In "Mrs Rucinter", a kind of dissonant post-psychedelic noir built on a highly unstable technique, the drum rhythm only takes shape after 3 minutes, yet never manages to solidify the chaos. Even more so, "Western Machines" — an advanced-stage "Mrs Rucinter" — sounds like an impossible hybrid of twangy guitar work, aleatory synthesizer music and a babel of drum'n'bass samples, not far from the atonal cyclones of Morton Subotnick.

The album's phantasmagoria peaks with "Joe Chip", an exotica piece built on reversed vocals and an industrial ballet of robotic zombies. But the most intricate pieces are "Buone cose a lei", a Captain-Beefheart-esque anti-rhythm propped up and undermined in equal measure by electronics in a grotesque relay with another anti-rhythm — this time ambient and abstract (with faint echoes of King Crimson's "Moonchild") — leading into an off-kilter piano nocturne set against a drumming march, and above all "Q", where a lounge atmosphere planted in a wasteland of microorganisms arrives at a "Tortoise-like" remix that turns it into a metaphysical jam with techno overtones, until the instruments raise a wall of noise.

From Italian instrumental rock, a self-portrait of a band genuinely devoted to a sincerity that is instinctive concatenation, a multiplicity of sonic and stylistic sources, rigorous study and beguiling chance. Remarkably rich in invention, it's also an album about the memory of the avant-garde, but it's a record — recorded live — that is more passionate than academic, bearing both the strength and the limits of a debut work. Reprocessed and post-produced by Fabio "Reeks" Recchia (percussion and live electronics) at his personal studio, Hombrelobo, in Rome. (Curious) artwork by Roberto Mattiucci.

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24/10/2012