L.C.BMAURIZIO BIANCHI - Ferox Forcipe

Back in 1987, the Japanese label Beast 666 - now 777 - released the box set "Journey Into Pain", later reissued a few years on by Statutory and RRRecords. Back then, this writer was completely in the dark about releases of that kind, partly because: either you were in the know, or you kept listening - to this day with great pleasure - to the "Mixage" compilations and Valerie Dore. Alas, with extreme delay, I discovered this journey into pain only twenty years later: for the record, it's a delightful anthology - a cult item today - gathering numerous noise, industrial and related shades of that era, from Cranioclast to Merzbow and from P16.D4 to Autopsia, just to name a few.

The obvious question arises: what does any of this have to do with the Ferox Forcipe at hand? Truth be told, (almost) nothing, aside from the strong attraction - or fetish - I feel every time I stumble upon box-tapes with a highly diseased character, and for the noise pushed to extremes contained within. I've been following Giovanni Mori, aka L.C.B. (Le Cose Bianche), musically since the days of "Dopo ore di silenzio" (Alampo, 2010): a record worth framing that went unnoticed, one that deserves reassessment and a reissue. We won't draw any comparisons to artists past or present, simply because, in my ignorance, I can't find any - but above all because the man deserves credit on his own terms.

L.C.B. first built, and then evolved or devolved - depending on how you look at it - his own sound. In his persistence with noise and with a peculiar form of nihilism, he has nonetheless found a very precise identity of his own, and it's no coincidence that, from his scrappy, melodramatic beginnings in Malameccanica, we now find him duetting and duelling in collaborations with Maurizio Bianchi, Lyke Wake and Eraldo Bernocchi (Sigillum S and Obake).

"Ferox Forcipe" - a double tape housed in an enticing VHS box - is thus his own personal vindication. It brings together unreleased material left in the drawer, never published in these six years of activity (tape A), and tracks retrieved from around the world among his many releases (tape B), to the point that it would be easier to keep pace with the Olympic 100-metre champion than to keep up with his output. Is it representative of the sounds that his troubled state of mind has expressed? Absolutely not - it's entirely missing the early phase, the more approachable one that we're fonder of. Maybe he fell out of his high chair a little too late (just a joke, don't take it too seriously), and we'll never know what drove him to this radical shift in sound. Indeed, because you can even change the way you make noise - in fact, between splatter imagery, pornographic titles and true-crime subject matter, he might as well rename himself Le Cose Nere.

Anyone approaching him for the first time would find his power weird noise harsh and violent, the kind of thing that makes you want to throw in the towel immediately, in contrast to his early years, marked by an alienating post-industrial agglomeration, with (almost) trip-hop undertones and a muffled techno wrapped inside soap bubbles on the verge of bursting. Today, you'd be hard-pressed to spot any violin parts or those delightful little noises reminiscent of shattering Swarovski crystal. It's time to cauterise your brain, take repeated slaps in the face with sandpaper gloves, and hundreds of pneumatic punches to the gut. Watch out: there's a shady figure wandering around with a bloodied forceps - which explains the roll of gauze inside - and a rigged, barely-functioning oscillator, intent on photographing you in crime-scene poses or crucifying you on a telegraph pole.

The box set is clearly a collector's item. Is it a cult object? At the moment nobody can say for sure - perhaps in twenty years we'll meet again and see whether the thirty-three unstable souls who bought a copy were ahead of their time. Do we need to point out that it should be listened to at full blast? I don't think so, but just in case: play loud!

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09/08/2014