MAURIZIO MARSICO - Post Human Folk Music

Milan-based Maurizio Marsico is among the most extroverted, restless and prolific musicians on the Italian scene. Always fascinated by artificial sonorities and the interaction between man and machine, Marsico is an emblematic example of those musicians who - despite an academic background - engage with modernity and technology, having proven capable over the course of his career of ranging from austere experimentation to typically '80s italodisco, from collaborations with Rai on Serena Dandini's programme "Obladi Oblada", to cosmic electronics. In total around forty albums, often hard to find, released under various pseudonyms that almost suggest a desire to blend into the boundless contemporary record market.

After the '80s revival of "The Sunny Side Of The Dark Side" and the collaboration with synth maestro Riccardo Sinigaglia on "Nature spontanee", Marsico brings back to life his most prolific creature - the Monofonic Orchestra - with the new "Post Human Folk Music", another bold electronic experiment made up of just three tracks dominated by the monumental "Sticky Metal Tiles", a full 45 minutes long. Post-human folk, in that it is (almost) devoid of acoustic elements, defined by Marsico as "visions of sounds and notes beyond dystopian realities", with quotes from Ballard ("even the worst science fiction is better than the best contemporary fiction"), underlining how art is by its very nature abstraction, a distancing from reality, and therefore artificial. Even man himself becomes artificial, continually enriched by "emotional" or interactive prostheses that are seen not in a de-evolutionary sense, as in the case of the Residents, but rather as hyper-evolutionary, an enrichment and expansion of human experience ("Let's stop demonizing people glued to their smartphones, let's come to terms with it, they are new human beings technologically extended").

The forty-five minutes of "Sticky Metal Tiles" are a colossal miscellany of sounds and influences, a melting pot within which one can quickly move from electronic pulsations to moments halfway between the bucolic and the chamber-music-like. The opening is thoroughly post-human, from the obsessive rhythm to the robotic voices; a long meandering electronic beat that after seven minutes dissolves into an unexpected clarinet amid birdsong; in a sense it's like passing from Kraftwerk to the Gardens of the Pharaohs of Popol Vuh. At the ninth minute comes an almost post-punk bass rhythm, with rapid guitar chords recalling a sort of supergroup made up of Can with Florian Fricke on flute. At the sixteenth minute an electric piano solo with new-age water sounds serves as an interlude; at the twentieth, a new frantic post-human rhythm arrives, with short bursts of acid guitar notes, almost like psychedelia for robots thirsty for LSD, followed by funk inflections.

New techno rhythms at the twenty-fifth minute with the addition of trumpet; from the twenty-eighth minute on we enter thoroughly cosmic territory, seemingly paying homage to many classic science-fiction film soundtracks. Suddenly, from the thirty-second minute - as if in a journey through time - we move swiftly from science fiction to the smoky atmosphere of a black-and-white noir, with a nostalgic jazz piano. But it's only a brief interlude that, from the thirty-fifth minute, leads to the most properly post-human moment, perhaps even post-apocalyptic, in the sense of a man who is by now almost entirely robot; bass and drums (hi-hat cymbals) introduce desolate scenery, with electronic (radioactive?) winds that open out into the long finale of about ten minutes, with beatbox rhythms, birdsong, manipulations and fascinating timbral explorations with the synth.

The remaining tracks reference minimalism master Terry Riley and his masterpiece "A Rainbow In A Curved Air"; "An Eyebrow In Cursed Fair" and "Another Eyebrow In Cursed Fair" are two ironic reworkings of Riley, of a new mysticism created by machines. While it's not easy to recognize the original, Marsico's intuition comes through clearly; the mystical, Eastern aspect - which played such a major role in Riley's work - can also be the central pivot of the "new" man, one ever more locked in symbiotic relation with technology. Whether this is a hope or a threat is not for us to find out.

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22/03/2018