MASMAS - Make A Mess

Let's imagine for a moment going back some twenty-five years, rewinding the tape, sorry, clearing our browser history and emptying the cache, to try and recapture the wonder we felt after listening to bands like, just to name the most "deranged and elusive" ones, Black Dice. Let's try for a moment to remember that instant, that marvel mixed with disorientation. And then let's put on "Make A Mess", the debut album by MasMas, the Rome-based collective made up of multi-instrumentalists and composers (and many other things besides) Simone Alessandrini, Mauro Remiddi and Simone Pappalardo, and try to keep that recollection intact, letting it slowly resurface. Younger listeners will certainly feel thrown off, perhaps not knowing Black Dice or those underground worlds at all, but the more seasoned among us will prick up our ears and quite probably recognize that feeling, that irresistible hook.

"Make A Mess" is, in fact, a record that binds together analogue and digital electronics, song, improvisation and sound art to convey the need to "make a mess" as a creative and vital act, to use the trio's own words. A group open to every possible sonic experience, moving without coordinates, floating through musical space and overturning the rules of physics and of mere composition. Instruments coexist, not by chance, with objects, home-built machines and field recordings, while the voice intertwines with all manner of noise and the saxophone veers between frequency and dissonance.

The title – born from a domestic episode, when Remiddi's daughter tipped over her toys shouting "Let's make a mess!" – is consequently a philosophical manifesto before it is a strictly sonic one, in which disorder becomes mental openness and opens up listening perception to an ocean of possibilities. Chaos, more or less organized, then. Or rather decomposed, roughed up with mischievous humour in places and with extreme surgical precision elsewhere, across eight tracks that unfold one after another, battering the eardrums with uninhibited abandon yet, at the same time, with genuine pathos.

It's an alchemy that finds its raison d'être in Pappalardo's Rome studio, in the Alessandrino neighbourhood, an utterly chaotic and beautiful place where the music takes shape as if in a laboratory, amid home-built instruments, live-take recordings and analogue and digital manipulations. And then there are voices, the background noise of streets battered by everyday life, children running about and raindrops falling into open microphones: in the eight compositions of "Make A Mess", everything becomes part of a one-of-a-kind script, somewhere between a distortion embracing a melody and a mangled saxophone squealing with pleasure like a hedgehog while an angelic voice whispers poetry or flashes of real life.

"Make A Mess" is a wonderful example of how three musicians coming from different backgrounds can decide to break free of their own boundaries and soar through the sky like seemingly deranged eagles: Simone Alessandrini, saxophonist and composer, comes from jazz and singer-songwriter music, while Mauro Remiddi, voice and guitar, is internationally known for the project Porcelain Raft, just as Simone Pappalardo, an electroacoustic artist and sound design lecturer, is widely renowned for his innate ability to build analogue and digital instruments and devices. A trio that looks irreconcilable on paper, yet remarkably skilled at bringing to life a work that blends art-pop tribalism, sound collage, electroacoustic improvisation and whatever else you can think of, without ever coming across as self-indulgent or aimless.

It's no coincidence, after all, that MasMas scored Rä di Martino's film "Controfigura" at the Museo Macro and collaborated with performer Silvia Calderoni on "Moonbird", presented at the Triennale di Milano, at Rome's Mattatoio, at PhEST in Monopoli, at the Vive le Cinema Festival in Lecce and at Avvistamenti in Bisceglie. The three also took part in the soundtrack for the documentary "L'Avamposto" by Edoardo Morabito, presented at the Venice Biennale during the Giornate degli Autori. Not only that: MasMas have set up a permanent workshop in the Alessandrino neighbourhood, where they record and experiment with new sonic languages. In the coming months, this will also give rise to instrument-building and improvisation workshops in collaboration with Nuova Consonanza and the CIP Alessandrino, with the aim of creating a small "neighbourhood orchestra".

These are the intersections and experiences that implicitly laid the groundwork for a truly singular album, one where encountering the holograms of DM Stith or Tyondai Braxton isn't some pipe dream for diehards of a long-gone transatlantic experimental scene, but a mirage to be cherished and roughed up as needed.

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07/06/2026