ST. PANGOLIN - St. Pangolin

The trio of cosmic improvisers St. Pangolin formed in Catania in 2014, and towards the end of that same year recorded live, in one take, the four collective improvisations captured on their first (double) self-titled album, "St. Pangolin".

The running times, all colossal, keep growing throughout. The reference points pile up, from Hash Jar Tempo to Everlovely Lightningheart.

The first track (17'16") spreads malefic waves adorned with thuds, tolling bells and miasmas, while the electronics "sing" acidic and tormented, like a witch under electroshock. The development is static, in the manner of Lou Reed's "Metal Machine Music", but with dynamic upheavals of anti-counterpoint and a rhythmic logic all its own. Either way, the intent is twisted into something both danceable and abstract, until the components collide in dissonance, in a white-hot chaos that is the bastard offspring of a bastard track like the Velvet Underground's "European Son" (but also of the most terrifying dark-folk).

The second track (20'45") kicks off with reverbs played like pneumatic drills, while a thread of Jimi Hendrix-esque feedback wanders off in several directions until it turns monstrous. The whole thing sounds like a Throbbing Gristle session, but with even less of a harmonic backbone. Just as it seems about to expire, the atmosphere flares up again around the screaming instruments, until they exhale into enormous chords.

The third track (21'59") opens onto a scenario both similar and different, supremely dissonant, made of violin glissandos in a haze of electronic foam, with drills and electric saws, which crumbles into new oscillating, galactic cacophonies (with the occasional stray pseudo-melodic phrase). Everything collapses into whirlwinds and vortices steeped in a horrifying mood.

The fourth track runs a clean hour. A deafening chaos collapses almost instantly down to the microscopic level, gravitating and then thickening into a photonic machine gun. The landscape grows ever more densely strewn with terror, a terror that the screamed distortions take turns twisting into pure "aboriginal" hypnosis. By the 35-minute mark only the echoes remain, punctuated by death-knell bells. An impalpable electronic pulse then opens onto a sci-fi expanse, where, notably, the only moment of traditional harmony appears (a timid psychedelic strumming). The last 20 minutes - more than a simple decrescendo - amount to a long, meticulous, theatrical dismantling of the scenery built up until then.

The work of Claudio Palumbo (guitar, electronics), Simona Strano (guitar) and Davide Ianniti (violin and objects, already of Loveless Whizzkid), in the way it grinds down and cannibalizes the clichés typical of the genre (or genres), is a postmodern classic. With its spartan packaging (reminiscent of early Faust, and not only in appearance), the absence of track titles, the exhausting running times, the temperature permanently at white heat, the instant, unrevised recording, and the disappearance of individual personalities, it also sounds like a fierce and monumental antidote to mass consumption. The second release from Sicily's Hopeful Monsters, following Stash Raiders.

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05/08/2015