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On post-industrial materials: exposures, debris, residues and submersions.

"PRIMOREGISTRAZIONI is one of the thousand independent labels with a fetish for expressive research music and CDRs... PRIMOREGISTRAZIONI tends towards liminal and anomic music, music that's usually labeled as no-wave, noise, industrial, post-punk, power electronics, harsh".

This is how this interesting microlabel based between Rome and Monfalcone del Sannio presents itself, and it shows how in recent times the Italian musical fabric has been busier than ever, and above all attentive in picking up on certain inputs, especially those coming from certain subcultures.

Now, whether there's still such a thing as "experimental" music (by definition) nowadays is, so to speak, entirely up for debate, given that the historical avant-garde — and even more so the heterodox sounds derived from it — has undergone a gradual process of absorption by mass culture, or at least by mass-market niches. And it's precisely in this vein that the project "Obsolescenza Programmata" fits in, which, like a two-faced Janus, looks with conviction to the post-industrial climate of the early Eighties, while at the same time carefully internalizing whatever is new coming from the neighboring territories of electroacoustics, sound art, microsound, and even new-generation harsh noise.

What's more, not only does the project's visual-conceptual identity seem to speak for itself quite clearly, but above all the music — across the four CD-Rs released over the course of 2007 — manages to present itself as an entity in constant mutation.

Instability, distortion and drift of meaning. "Obsolescenza Programmata" works through subtraction and accumulation at the same time, but more than that, even while almost methodically respecting a certain operational practice, it's capable of veering off and swerving, of introducing that stochastic variable that throws the coherence of perception into complete disarray.

Musica Per Esposizione

"Musica Per Esposizione" thrives on this instability. Originally conceived as the soundtrack for the exhibition "Frammenti d'Amor" by painter Ettore Frani, "Musica Per Esposizione" is the first Emanation of "Obsolescenza Programmata". Here lies the origin of the mutation, of continuity within discontinuity. It's interesting, in fact, to note how across eleven tracks — and even within a single track — the duo plays with different sound sources, each decontextualized and repurposed for the occasion. Détournement, cut-up, the shaping and reshaping of concrete or supposedly concrete sounds; classic processes of post-industrial music, but here handled in a holographic, demystifying manner, I'd dare say, almost as if to dismantle that experimentalist posturing that has become standard practice over the years.

In short, this is music that serves and is subordinate to a purpose (that of the exhibition, precisely), and is therefore free of the self-indulgent sensationalism that's a recurring feature of operations of this kind. But it's not wallpaper music — rather, it's music for skulls poking out of the walls. Exactly, because the soundtrack sounds loud and dense despite the low recording volume, and manages to saturate the listening space and shape it according to its own needs. In the sense that ambient music, in this case, turns into music of the environment, and far from bending to its structure, becomes structure itself. A sort of process whereby the signifier absorbs the meaning, which then becomes its own misshapen, monochrome simulacrum.

Perhaps it's precisely because of this strong personality, or if you will, its intrusiveness, that "Musica Per Esposizione" ended up not being used for the exhibition after all. But who knows.

Anyway, getting to the heart of the matter, the record manages to strike a balance between old and (supposedly) new; in short, post-industrial sludge — Hafler Trio, Ralf Wehowsky and the finest noisy isolationism come to mind — rehashed according to the stylistic tropes of the Ambiances Magnétiques crowd ("Successivo Destarsi"). It moves from the Illusion Of Safety-esque ravings of "Coro Di Voci Nere (ovvero pesi sospesi in respiri)" and "Campana Suona Per La Terza Volta" to the rhythmic implosions of "Campana Suona Per La Seconda Volta". The whole thing is as oppressive and disturbing as little else heard around these parts lately.

Detrito

"Detrito" doesn't work on the subconscious, doesn't sneak into the neurons unnoticed, but grabs them decisively. Where "Musica Per Esposizione" penetrates with a slippery approach to stage a retroactive sublimation, "Detrito" strikes directly in the face with a tremendously percussive and destabilizing noise. Shall we name a few names? Certainly Test Dept. and Einsturzende Neubauten, if not You Fantastic itself. In short, those bands who turned percussive clattering and the disintegration of sonic matter into a tool of semantic chaos.

Once again "Obsolescenza Programmata" skillfully shuffles the deck, staging - albeit within a more clearly defined sound - a continuous feedback (and overlapping) of signs, causing a loss of referentiality that might reveal something to the listener about the compositional processes.

Here the music moves forward linearly, no doubt about it, but as it advances it gathers a multitude of undefined, indistinct materials, radioactive-dump debris that gradually increases its destabilizing charge. An anarcho-primitivist totem, that's what it is. "Lullablues/De-Intro" opens the dance and unmistakably lays out the coordinates of a sound perpetually making and unmaking itself. The first half of the track ("Lullablues") travels along the tracks of a dark hyperbaric-chamber blues, which then, in the second half, contaminates itself - or rather estranges itself - with noise from shortwave transmissions in the style of Conet Project. The following "Dance Hell" is, precisely, a tribal dance of clear Neubauten-esque derivation, revealing an interesting through-line with new-generation harsh noise, while "Ausfhart" is pure new deutsche welle style. "Citazione In Coda Sonica" closes the record with a long silence that foreshadows a new storm...

Risulta

...I don't know whether "Risulta" is meant by its makers to be this new storm. The fact is that, despite being announced as "a collection of b-sides, an anthology of leftover music, so to speak," this cd-r is my favorite of the series. Having almost entirely abandoned the post-industrial sonorities of the first two installments, "Risulta" offers up that worn-out (leftover, indeed) and strung-out noise of the mid-90s, somewhere between Brice-Glace, Yona-Kit and You Fantastic, rounded off with the degenerate electronics of Pan Sonic and dub (or something resembling it).

In fact, as the guys stated on their blog, here the sound of "Obsolescenza Programmata" becomes more elusive than ever. It's the triumph of heterodoxy, of a music that keeps shifting, that veers and swerves, that slips away from comprehension right when it seems to finally come into focus.

Between hysterical dub-noise hypotheses ("Amianto", "Dubbio Titolo"), criminal-asylum isolationism (the ten minutes of "In Capo All'Anno") and sulfuric-acid panzer-noise ("Oggi Come Oggi", "Slice Of Life"), "Risulta" delves deeper into themes that the two previous works had only somehow hinted at. Because here the music turns into solid, almost tangible matter; a place that is no place, where the guys manage to combine the physical element with the psychological one, the subliminal mantras of "Musica Per Esposizione" and the uncompromising sonorities of "Detrito".

Mu O Dell'Inabissamento

Of sinking, as the title suggests, or of definitive catharsis? Hard to say, but either way, "Mu O Dell'Inabissamento" is the record that tries to say something different. In fact it's a three-track EP lasting barely fifteen minutes, in which "Obsolescenza Programmata" makes a rather clean break and tries its hand at "clean", and here truly ambient, music; electronic isolationism in the vein of Oren Ambarchi, in a sound that's still monochrome and completely folded in on itself. It's as if the guys had decided to engage with the original sign, with a hypothetical primitive purity that invokes the force of the natural elements (as the cover suggests), thus avoiding tricks and gimmicks and trying to steer clear of a drift toward the post-industrial scrapheap. A sound out of "concrete music" without actually being that. In a sense "Mu O Dell'Inabissamento" begins where the other cd-rs leave off; it sweeps away the ephemeral to bring the core of the discourse into focus. From this perspective, silence as a primal sign sets the coordinates and becomes the load-bearing structure.

The first track, "Ignifugo", is steeped in silence, or rather it's built upon it. Upon an underwater silence, almost muffled yet heavy. An imploded and imploding silence that manages to be a sun from which every single sound, every single particle of matter, radiates.

And so too the closing "Cosa Resta", which re-establishes the supremacy of "non-noise" after the panzer-noise of "Sulfureo" briefly tried to infect its purity.

The catalogue of "Obsolescenza Programmata" can be requested here.

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